I have no dog in this fight, but just from my small sampling, my co-workers are putting the blame directly on Dish and ready to bail.
For the past two weeks at work we've had open houses, customer appreciation days and all that nonsense. All 20 of our sales guys who are based all around the country were in, and the topic of the removal of FSN on Dish can up during lunch earlier in the week. Our sales rep out of Cleveland and big Indians fan canceled Dish and switched to DirecTV a few weeks ago. Our guys in Minneapolis and Milwaukee said they were done with Dish and will be making the switch to DirecTV or cable when they get back home, with the Twins in first place in the AL Central and the Brewers only a few games back in the NL Central, neither one of our northern mid-westerner's want to miss out in September. Our sales rep in Charlotte is waiting for the Fall, if FSN is still off for hockey and basketball season he said he's switching to Spectrum. His wife is a phone rep for Charter, and they're eligible for deeply discounted cable, but always stuck by Dish but he said no more if come October and he can't see his Hurricanes and Hornets. Our guy in San Diego is the only one that really didn't care. He's not a hardcore Pandres fan, and with the season they've been having he joked and said the loss of FSN San Diego is a blessing.
The pure irony of all of this all of our sales guys were put up at a Hilton Garden Inn hotel. They must have DirecTV there, because all of them were complaining about no preseason football because of the Nexstar blackout. The CBS affiliate here in Buffalo is a Nexstar station.
The general attitude here would be typically bye-bye, don't let the door hit ya, enjoy your higher prices and terrible DVRs. But in the real world (outside of enthusiast sites like this), people generally don't care about hardware from what I've seen. The guy in Cleveland didn't have an opinion about the Hopper versus his DirecTV set up, a DVR is a DVR, all he wants are his Indians games. And while I've heard people complain about their cable or satellite boxes, it's never been a strong factor in deciding to switch. People care more about price and content, and if the service doesn't have the content they want then the price is irrelevant.
