I was wrong about the DISH Hopper

I set out to write this blog post so I could complain about the silliness of the DISH Hopper. I mean the whole idea of recording all of the prime time shows from the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX) for the past 8 days just didn’t make any sense to me.

Mainly because I have enough trouble getting through the few shows I do record (a few weeks ago I watched an episode of House, a show no longer on the air, that featured Black Friday commercials from 2011). And I don’t need to be tempted with every new show on every major network.

But then it happened.

Missed one of my favorite shows

One of the shows I do watch, Dancing with the Stars, decided to mix it up this year and do an “all-stars” season. Well, my DIRECTV DVR is set to automatically record shows matching the title “Dancing with the Stars”, not “Dancing with the Stars: All-Stars”. So the season premiere a few weeks ago? Yeah, my DVR didn’t record it.

Luckily, I was able to catch the mistake about 25 minutes into the live airing of the show. I adjusted my DVR to record the new season and hit up Hulu the next day to catch the first part of the show I missed.

But I couldn’t help but wonder how much differently this situation would have gone down if I had the DISH Hopper. I wouldn’t have had to do anything. The show, despite its new name, would have been sitting on my DVR ready to watch.

More false assumptions I made

I decided to do a little more digging on the DISH Hopper and I quickly found another false assumption I made. I figured if the tuners inside the DVR were so busy recording prime time shows they wouldn’t be available to record anything else. Not so. The Hopper has 6 (count ’em) tuners! 4 for recording the major networks and 2 more to record whatever you want.

Lastly, I assumed the DISH Hopper would always be filling up quickly due to all of the prime time shows for the past 8 days taking up so much space. Again, I was wrong. The Hopper has a massive 2 TB (that’s 2,000 GB) hard drive that can record up to 2,000 hours of television. Wow!

Add to that automatic commercial skipping, whole-home sharing and more and I have to admit, I was grossly wrong about the DISH Hopper. In fact, I think it’s pretty darn cool.

And I hate to say it, but I even love their commercials!