Dish to Ship ‘Hopper With Sling’ Premium DVR This Month

"Dish has always been a maverick,” Clayton said. “Part of that is we embrace change. A lot of people run from change. We embrace technology, because that’s what makes us provide greater benefits to the consumer, and then we embrace the consumer.” Clayton thinks Dish must always stay on “a path of continuous improvement,” he said. “I maintain the American public today is not making a gradual shift to mobile. It’s a full sprint.” That’s why “we've got to embrace mobility,” he said.

Lots of people want to watch content on their tablets and smartphones, “but it’s really fragmented,” said Vivek Khemka, Dish vice president-product management. “As a normal consumer, I have no clue what I can watch and where I can watch it. In fact, some cable companies will let you watch live TV on your iPad, but only if you're in your home, and not even all the channels, so it’s a very broken experience.” Dish thinks that with Sling now built into the Hopper, “we have actually revamped the entire mobile tablet ecosystem,” Khemka said.

Also being unveiled at CES is a “Dish Anywhere” app that will emphasize doing away with the “fragmented” viewing experience many consumers find so frustrating, Khemka said. With a Dish installation at home, “you take it anywhere with you,” he said. “There are no disclaimers, no fine print, nothing attached to it.” All that a Dish customer needs to watch TV remotely is a tablet or smartphone with a Dish Anywhere app installed and a broadband connection, he said.

"Hopper Transfers” is a third innovation Dish is announcing at CES. Though Hopper Transfers will work exclusively with a Hopper With Sling DVR, Dish Anywhere is designed to work with any Dish “legacy” set-tops, Khemka said. Using the Hopper With Sling set-top, a customer can use the Hopper Transfers app to send content from the DVR for storage to an iPad, enabling that user to view programs even on an airplane that doesn’t have Wi-Fi, Khemka said. The Hopper Transfers app takes an HD, high-resolution file from the DVR, using the Sling transcoder in the set-top, and compresses it to a smaller file size suitable for storage on an iPad, he said. It takes about five minutes to transfer an hour-long show to a mobile device, he said. The transfer can’t be done remotely, only at home, he said. Hopper Transfers will be available only for the iPad at the start, but Dish “will launch other platforms later,” he said.

Resolution of HD material that’s transferred to the iPad will be less than 720p, he said, but he defied anyone to tell the difference in picture quality between the iPad image and the identical image on the home Hopper DVR. Most material can be transferred to an iPad only once, he said. Certain “flagged” restricted content, including HBO movies, can’t be transferred at all, but only “moved” in one direction, meaning when the file reaches the iPad, it’s deleted from the DVR, he said.

New ways to “discover” content with a second-screen iPad marks a fourth Dish CES introduction. It is a new app called “Dish Explorer,” which is about “engaging with your TV when you're in front of your TV,” Khemka said. Though many third-party apps attempt to help the consumer wade through the thousands of hours of content available for viewing, none can emulate the “full-closed-loop” experience of Dish Explorer, he said. Unlike Dish Explorer, “they don’t know what you're watching, they don’t integrate on-demand content, they don’t integrate DVR content and they don’t control your TV,” he said. “When they tell you to go watch How I Met Your Mother, they'll tell you to pick up your remote control and tune to channel 128, which doesn’t make any sense.” Keying in a favorite movie or TV show in a search command will bring up that content anywhere it’s on TV and record it to the DVR, he said. Dish Explorer as a free app is available at Apple’s App Store, Dish said.