Dish Expands Hopper Device Line With SuperJoey, Wireless Joey
LAS VEGAS -- Dish expanded its line of DVR devices with SuperJoey, a new version of its Joey Hopper DVR extenders that lets users record up to eight programs in the same house at one time, up from the six possible previously, CEO Joe Clayton told a CES news conference Monday. The device, paired with the existing Hopper set-top box, accomplishes that by adding an extra two tuners, he said. In the process, Super Joey “virtually eliminates channel conflict in multiple TV households,” he said. The device is compatible with all models of the Hopper, Dish said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1ad9nTm).
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The company also bowed a Wireless Joey that Dish said is targeted at homes where coaxial or Ethernet wiring is “difficult to achieve or undesirable.” The device creates its own dedicated 802.11ac Wi-Fi cloud within the home, it said. Both devices will ship in the January-March time frame, Clayton told us. Pricing wasn’t set, he said. The current Joey costs $7 a month and the Hopper costs $12 a month, so SuperJoey’s price will be “some place in between,” said Clayton.
The company will also start an app this spring that Clayton said will give customers control of the Hopper Whole-Home HD DVR on the PS4 and PS3. The new Virtual Joey “provides a nearly identical experience” to the Hopper hardware-based Joey, making live TV and recordings accessible on the PlayStation consoles, said Dish. The app will be similar to the one it announced Sunday for 2013 and 2014 LG smart TVs. The LG TV app will launch in the January-March time frame, it said.
Dish will also release a version of its Dish Anywhere app for Android-based Kindle Fire tablets, said Vivek Khemka, senior vice president-product management, at the news conference. He didn’t say when it will launch. Dish currently offers the Dish Anywhere app for other Android-based tablets, Android smartphones, iPads and iPhones, he said. Dish recently released an updated app for those devices with improvements that included the integration of the Dish Transfers feature, giving users the ability to view recorded content when no Internet connection is available.
Dish also added voice search and Hopper control capabilities to its Dish Explorer second-screen app for iPads, said Clayton. The system’s voice recognition function “can even understand a Southern accent” like his, he joked. While demonstrating that feature, Khemka later joked that it can understand not just a Southern accent but also a “Southern Indian accent” like his.
The company also “significantly enhanced” the Hopper user interface, said Clayton. Navigation has been made easier and Dish also added recommendation capability to the Hopper channel guide, the company said. The latter feature provides recommendations for TV shows, movies and other programs that are similar to those being watched by the user. Broadcast-TV networks have sued Dish to block the Hopper’s AutoHop commercial-skipping feature.
When Clayton joined Dish as CEO about two and a half years ago, “I didn’t need a lot of market research to tell me that the consumer doesn’t really care about megabytes, terabytes, megabits, gigabytes,” Clayton said last month at a New York media to preview Dish’s CES introductions. “He cares about, is the product affordable, in terms of video content? Is it mobile? Can I use it my home? Can I use it out of the home? And is it easy to use? Didn’t spend one dollar on market research figuring that out, but that’s what drives the American consumer.” As Dish enters 2014, “we're going to focus more on ease of use for the consumer,” Clayton said.
The mobile apps that Dish introduced in 2013 allowed Dish subscribers to take on the go the content they stored on their Hopper with Joey, “but we were still tethered by a coax cable if you wanted to watch it on your big-screen TV,” Khemka said at last month’s briefing. “We wanted to allow customers different ways and more options to watch TV.” Khemka said that’s why Dish devised the Wireless Joey multi-room Hopper DVR extender that it’s spotlighting at this CES.
The IEEE 802.11ac-compatible Wireless Joey works through a “wireless access point” component that pairs with a Hopper DVR or a regular Joey, said Khemka. “You don’t have to have a whole network, you don’t have to have an Internet connection. This access point can just plug into the back of the Hopper.” The “private cloud” it creates in the home is “not visible to any of your devices,” nor will it interfere with an existing home network, he said. It “automatically frequency-hops to find the best available location,” he said. Two Wireless Joeys can be accommodated through a single wireless access point, he said. Dish opted not to launch an 802.11n-compatible Wireless Joey because the technology, though available, “wasn’t reliable,” he said. “If you were too far from your base station, the video was too choppy. It would break up.” With 802.11ac, “we're not seeing any of those” artifacts, he said.
SuperJoey gives customers who own multiple TVs “more tuners to view more shows,” Khemka said. Built slightly bigger than a regular Joey, SuperJoey adds two satellite tuners to the regular Joey array, and gives the user the capability to record eight shows simultaneously, he said. With SuperJoey, “I don’t see channel conflict in the foreseeable future,” Khemka said.