Dish's Hopper - Some DVR Innovations

Dish Network announced a new DVR device and service that is is calling the "Hopper".

OK, so it doesn't look like much.

The story is in the Hopper's functionality. In addition to the usual DVR features, the Hopper provides a whole-home DVR service (how implemented?) and 3 tuners instead of the usual 2. It has a roomy 2TB hard drive, which it claims will hold up to 250 hours of HD programming. In contrast, my Time Warner Scientific Atlanta 8300HD has a 160GB hard drive, which is typically of an average cable HD DVR box in the field.

The truly innovative feature of the Hopper it is a hybrid of the home-based and network-based DVR. The network based DVR will automatically (or with a single election by the user?) record all of the prime time programs on the Big 4 networks and keep them available for a period of 8 days. Smartly, since the network viewing within 7 days has value to advertisers, after that point it still has value, but the networks do not get paid for it ("Live+7" is the metric).

Effectively this means that a user does not have to use any of his or her tuners to record network prime time shows, but can use all three to record basic and premium cable. How much of DVR recording is Big 4 prime time? In short, most of it. A Cabletelevision Advertising Board presentation, citing Nielsen, found that broadcast programs accounted for 66% of prime time playback of recorded programs).

The bigger hard drive increases the DVR's capacity. The network DVR of the broadcast prime time also effectively increases the DVR's capacity. On the plus side, the easy to understand DVR recording rule means that all you need to know is that it was a broadcast show. Whether that distinction is meaningful to younger people is a bit of an open question. In some ways the automatic broadcast prime recording increases the DVR's convenience.

In other ways, this is less convenient. No longer is your list of recorded shows "all wheat, no chaff", now your DVR will be filled with a bunch of things that you really don't want to see. Unless there are two lists, one of your recordings and one of the broadcast prime time recordings. That's no one's idea of user friendly. Additionally, the large size of the hard drive means that there are more things to wade through, even if they are of your own choosing. (It is unclear if there is any better search or filing system on this DVR. There is a "state of the art user interface, according to the somewhat-breathless Dish marketing materials.) It is difficult to navigate more choices without a keyboard (an anathema in the living room) or something truly creative like Apple's original iPod click wheel.

In some ways the Hopper might be developing the navigation problem of cable VOD compared to the DVR. Wading through a lot of stuff, most of which I DON'T want to see, is one of the two big VOD problems and generally not a DVR problem. (The other big VOD problem is not know whether the program you want is even available on VOD; the Hopper's simple recording rule does put a dent in that problem).

Dish also announced the companion to the Hopper box itself, oddly called the "Joey" which it bills as the smallest set-top box in the world offering full HD DVR functionality. (Translation: the Joey doesn't have a hard drive, but can access the hard drive on the main Hopper box). It, too, is not much of a looker.

The bottom line is that innovation in the DVR space is good for consumers and for that Dish Network deserves praise.