Technoglitch
Core Member
Service providers have two ways to fight the cord-cutting movement: Slash their prices or boost their price/performance ratio. Dish Network aims to do the latter with its latest DVR, the Hopper 3. The set-top box’s top two features: It’s packed with 16 tuners, virtually eliminating the possibility of recording conflicts, and it can turn your home theater into a sports bar by displaying four shows simultaneously (each in 1080p) on a single 4K TV. Not enough to catch all the games you want to see? You can split a 4K screen into six 720p windows.
It’s powered by a quad-core Broadcom 7445 processor that Dish Network Chief Technology Officer Vivek Khemka says is “seven times faster than DirecTV’s boxes, and twice as fast as the TiVo Bolt.” The box delivers 10-bit color and is outfitted with HDMI 2.0, gigabit ethernet, and MoCA 2.0. Storage comes in the form of a 2TB hard drive sufficient for recording 500 hours of HD video. A USB 3.0 port lets users plug in a second hard drive for supplemental storage.
A 4K set-top box without 4K content isn’t a compelling offering, and 4K broadcasts look to be far in the future. So Dish will offer Netflix streaming in 4K, and it has signed deals with Sony Pictures, The Orchard, and Mance Media to deliver movies and other 4K content directly to the Hopper 3 and the 4K Joey.
Dish Network’s Hopper 3 can record 16 TV shows at once
