MSDN Subscription - Why isn't there a cheaper download-only offering?

As part of the MSDN Subscription offering, a box of discs is delivered most months with updated versions of Microsoft software. Because a single DVD has many products on it, the disc churn rate is reasonably high. In addition to the disks that come in the mail, MSDN subscribers can download all the software available as part of their subscription directly from a Passport-secured website

There is about a three month lag between a product being available on the download site, and the physical disc arriving, so any product that you're really keen to use (like Visual Studio, Office, Windows and SQL Server) gets downloaded and burnt to a DVD long before the discs every arrive. Even without broadband, it is possible to download big releases like Visual Studio - in the days of severe broadband usage limits, I downloaded Visual Studio.NET 2002 over dial-up. The download can be paused, so I just kicked it off each night before I went to sleep, and the full download only took a couple of nights.

It seems to make a lot of sense for Microsoft to offer a download-only offering for MSDN Subscription. The price of a subscription has roughly doubled in the last five years, and in my conversations with lots of folks around the user group and at work, there are plenty of ex-subscribers around who find the cost too high. It would be great if the savings in disk distribution that would be achieved with a download-only MSDN Subscription offering could be passed directly onto the developer community, and the rate of folks with subscriptions could pick up again.