Dish Dishes Up a Batch of New Services

Whole-house high-def is the mantra being chanted by Dish Network as it rolls out a collection of new services including  expanded streaming video services, corporate logos, mascots, and new programming, on-demand content, and satellite broadband offerings at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.

CEO Joe Clayton is calling it a "relaunch of the company," highlighted by the new whole-home DVR system, which will feature the Hopper HD DVR with a 2-terabyte hard drive that is capable of recording up to six HD signals at a time and playing back up to four live streams.

Hopper includes smaller Joey boxes, which will be deployed in various rooms around the house to allow video to be paused, played back, and recorded throughout the home.
 
The product enhances Dish's TV Everywhere efforts by being capable by automatically recording prime-time programming from all four major broadcast networks. This would provide access to programming quicker than the one-day window typically available on cable, Clayton argued.

Kid shows

Dish is expanding its Blockbuster @Home service to include 6,000 family and kids shows. For $10 per month, consumers can get access to more than 100,000 DVD movies, TV shows, and games by mail and streaming of more than 10,000 movies and TV shows, including more than 3,000 kids’ shows.

The main Hopper unit features:

• Three satellite TV tuners
• A two-terabyte hard drive for up to 2,000 hours of video entertainment
• Up to 250 hours of HD or up to 1,000 hours of SD user recordings
• Bluetooth for linking to devices such as wireless headphones
• Picture-in-picture for watching any two channels simultaneously

Combined with a Joey, the Hopper whole-home HD DVR system offers more advanced features:

• 750 MHz Broadcom processer -- the fastest satellite receiver processor available today for a quick, responsive on-screen guide
• Approximately 50 percent more energy efficient for a four-room installation than previous models
• ZigBee RF4CE using a proprietary protocol remote with "remote control finder" alert
• High definition user interface
• Easy-to-use, fast, graphical, tile-based user interface with predictive search
• Small, sleek chassis for convenient placement

"Building on a heritage of award-winning DVRs, DISH is proud to be the first to introduce a groundbreaking product that delivers the most choices for TV entertainment by integrating multiple sources of video into one set-top box," said DISH Network CEO Joe Clayton. "The Hopper gives our customers network TV shows on demand and thousands of family movie choices streaming or delivered to the hard drive. With its massive storage, the Hopper leads the industry in delivering the most entertainment options, bar none, for every member of the household."

The Hopper

The Hopper's new feature, PrimeTime Anytime, allows customers, with one click, to record using a single tuner all of the primetime TV programming from ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC -- the networks that deliver the most popular shows during primetime. Once activated by a customer, PrimeTime Anytime records network programming in high definition, where available, every night and stores them for eight days after they have aired.

This creates an on-demand library of approximately 100 hours of primetime TV shows, and makes it easy to catch up on episodes from last night and last week's airing.

The Hopper can record up to six TV shows at once (two live programs and four PrimeTime Anytime shows) while allowing viewers to watch up to four different recorded or on-demand shows in four rooms of the house, simultaneously. This gives a family a variety of options to control or view their recordings and to watch shows in any room from a single Hopper.

The Hopper also offers on-demand content for customers with limited or no Internet access with a feature called DISH Unplugged. This feature delivers via satellite hundreds of the most popular movies and TV shows to the hard drive, including transactional and authenticated videos on demand. DISH Unplugged provides a high quality picture without buffering and makes available many of the same streaming movie choices offered by Blockbuster @Home, including premium movie access.