….HD DVR entertainment system featuring the award-winning Hopper™ and Joey™.
The Hopper HD DVR and accompanying small Joey STBs create a whole-home HD DVR entertainment system that lets DISH customers easily record, pause, and play back shows from any room in the home. While most whole-home DVRs do not have the same DVR functionality on every TV, the Hopper and Joey whole-home system offers the same DVR functionality on every TV, letting customers pause, play and rewind both live and recorded HD programs in up to four rooms. The Hopper was unveiled by DISH CEO Joe Clayton at the 2012 International CES in Las Vegas, and it is already winning honors as a CES Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Award honoree. Pricing and packaging will be announced later this quarter. 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
- 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
The Hopper‘s 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 HD, 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 as many as 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’s on-demand capabilities give access to DISH’s Blockbuster @Home™, now enhanced with more than 10,000 total titles streaming to the TV. 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.
