It doesn't matter if it's Dish, Direct, or one of the cable companies, there will be periodic price increases. In large part, those increases are driven by the greedy program providers, especially the local station owners, that keep demanding higher and higher retransmission fees, despite declining viewer counts. And even when those 3-4 year contracts are renewed without a major battle, they all contain annual increases, so the costs go up every year anyway. To put it in perspective, retransmission fees were about 10% of the station owners income just 3-4 years ago, and last year they accounted for 30% of their income. Carriers like Dish, etc., that operate on relatively small margins, can only absorb a small amount of those increases before they have to pass it along to their subscribers. It used to be that TV stations were 100% advertising supported, but then our Congress critters saw fit to let them charge fees to the carriers if they opted out of the "must carry" rules, and that's where any changes to the system would have to start. The bottom line is that over the air reception of local stations is the only remaining free access to TV programming other than a small amount of legal streaming programming.
