I don't think Dish wants to drop BTN, but it does seem like they are playing hardball. IIRC there was some dispute last year that BTN wasn't in the basic tier and that may be the root cause of the standoff. Or it could be the $ amount to carry the network. On the one hand, you can respect Dish for trying to keep costs down for its customers rather than just rolling over and passing along the higher costs. On the other hand, I want my BTN! I've seen this before with other stations, and usually one side or the other will blink or they'll all come to their senses and compromise either right at the deadline or after a day or two of loss of programming, but I guess they just dropped AMC. I haven't given up on BTN yet. This weekend isn't a biggie since the game is on ESPN/ABC, and next weekend I'm out of town, but after that I'm dropping them if they don't get it.