The question is, once everybody ends up being at 87/97 what are they going to do with the bandwidth at 110/119? They will not want to move everybody's dishes from 87/97 to 110/119 when they already have them pointed at a slot receiving all the channels that they need.
At that point E* is playing with house money.
However: These two satellites won't do anything for us current HD subs, not for a while. We'll start getting more HD once all the current MPEG-2 HD channels get switched to MPEG-4, and that of course won't happen until the obsolete HD receivers are out of circulation.
In fact, I'd argue that they've been trying to do that ever since they announced that VOOM will only be available on MPEG-4 receivers, even though all of us here knew that VOOM was really just MPEG-2 with an MPEG-4 header. They were basically signalling End-of-Life notices to everyone with 921s, 942s, and other non-MPEG-4 receivers whose model numbers I cannot remember.
Once they get enough of those receivers out of circulation, they can move all existing HD to MPEG-4. (They may have also wanted to wait until they were sure these new encoders were up to snuff.) That is what will give them more space for HD, not these two new sats.
Looking far into the future, when all existing SD subs have been moved over to MPEG-4, they can either simulcast the new service on 110-119, or use all of that new bandwidth for glorious HD. My bet, however, is on the former. Dish won't want to have to repoint millions of dishes to the new slots; I have to think they'd rather let the upgrade process consist of sending out new receivers and letting the subscriber swap it out himself.
The real question, assuming they have twin MPEG-4 services running at both the current and new slots, is what happens to the wing satellites? Do they put East coast locals on 61.5 and West Coast locals on 129? And what about the other locations, like 148 and 118.7?
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