I have always looked at this as trying to figure out the motivation of the seller. If you can get a killer deal as a new customer, but existing customers can't get anything for loyalty. It's obvious that the marketing goals of the company is to get new customers. They either have no interest in existing customers or there is no competition. Since they have a killer deal for new customers, there must be competition. That narrows their motivation down to no interest in existing customers. With a service strategy like that, they are encouraging churn.
Since it seems that the entire industry has the same business model (not a lot of originality here), they are implying that if you are a value shopper (a nice way of saying someone who is trying to get the best price for a product), with everything on balance, you'll be changing providers whenever your contract expires.
This drives the cost of providing service for the provider. Someone has to pay for the killer deal. As has been mentioned earlier in this thread, if the providers took a more balanced approach, they could reduce churn and maybe make more profit. The only problem is that nasty competition thing again.
What do you do to differentiate yourself from the competition? The product is a commodity. *D's ESPN is no different than *E's ESPN. They can't offer different programming packages because the programming suppliers are deathly afraid of only getting paid by the subscribers who actually watch their channels.
They can't differentiate with service. It seems that none of them have figured out how to provide good customer service and all have settled for attempting to not piss off their customers bad enough for them to change.
All they have left is price. Since the programming suppliers charge pretty much the same to everyone, the only place to go is with new customers. Hence the mess they're in now.
When your contract is up, you need to evaluate what's available and change providers if there is a better deal. That's what the providers want. They have proven this with their pricing strategy. On the other hand, they hope that you're too lazy to shop and change, because they make a lot more money after the deals expire.
This all boils down to greed being the primary driver in the whole process. That, coupled with marketing departments stocked with none to clever marketers, and management whose idea of a long term goal is making it until lunch time has made this mess.
Personally, I am staying with Dish because there is too much effort to change. I will take their silly price increases and 'fees' until it reaches the point where I decide that pay TV is no longer worth the price. I am lucky that a $50 antenna in my attic picks up dozens on local channels.
