LAS VEGAS—So you never, ever, ever have to decide which television shows are worth recording again, Dish Networks offers up its latest Hopper DVR which supports 4K content and features 16 (!) separate tuners. The Hopper 3 announcement comes alongside the reveal of the HopperGO, a storage drive for watching your scads of recorded content offline and on the go.
The Hopper 3's most notable feature is its aforementioned 16 tuners, which Dish claims produce a "conflict-free" TV experience. Each tuner can record or display live content from a separate channel, and when used in conjunction with Dish Network's Joey devices can send different shows to various rooms in your home and record an almost-absurd number shows at once. This is a marked upgrade from our Editors' Choice DVR, the Hopper with Sling, which has six tuners, expandable to eight, total, with the Super Joey box.
The latest Hopper also supports ultra high-definition (UHD, or 4K) content. Live television has yet to be widely broadcast in 4K, but services like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube offer 4K content. The Hopper 3 will be able to access Netflix 4K shows and movies, and Sony Pictures will offer a selection of its films on demand in 4K over the box. The updated Joey 3 box will provide this 4K content to additional rooms in the home, in a whole-home setup.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Hopper 3's 4K support is how it can handle lower resolution channels. The box will offer 4K Sports Bar Mode, a new view that can display four separate high-definition channel feeds on one 4K screen. While it's called Sports Bar Mode, it works with any four channels at once.
Along with the Hopper 3, Dish Network announced the HopperGO mobile drive. Sling place-shifting technology lets Hopper with Sling owners watch live and recorded television remotely, streamed from their set-top boxes to their mobile device or computer. The HopperGO expands that concept to offline viewing for DVR content. It's a portable storage device with 64GB of flash memory. Dish users can transfer up to 100 hours of DVR content from a Hopper 3 or Hopper with Sling DVR to the HopperGO and watch it offline. The HopperGO wirelessly streams its stored video to connected mobile devices over Wi-Fi, with a battery that Dish claims will last up to four hours.
The Hopper 3 will come to Dish users in January, with a monthly fee of $15. The HopperGO starts shipping late Q1, and will be available for a one-time $99 fee.