Dish Hopper Advertising Commercial Skip

[epete]

I was hearing many advertisements on SiriusXM that Dish is offering "a new "Auto Hop" feature to its Hopper HD DVR system that allows you to jump over all commercials in recorded prime-time programs from ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC when viewed a day after airing."

Quote taken from this CNET Review

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57 ... p-feature/

So how does Dish think they are going to avoid getting sued by Hollywood the way Sonic|Blue got sued for this with their ReplayTV Commercial Advance Feature?

I am wondering how this system compares to Media Center as a multistream HD PVR.

[richard1980]

Wow, you are just now hearing about this? This is old news, and there's already a lawsuit in progress from several of the networks. They are claiming it's copyright infringement (as I understand it, the lawsuit alleges the Hopper is making an unauthorized copy of the content, but that is not how I understand the Hopper to work. It is my understanding it just does an instant skip over the commercials rather than making a commercial-free copy).

[epete]

yes, my interest in Satellite has been minimal so when I hear about Satellite offers I usually don't pay attention. Anyway, ReplayTV did the same thing, the entire program is there and when the Commercial Advance function was turned on, it would simply skip over the content marked as a commercial. The only difference I see is Dish does not allow commercial skipping on teh same day the program was recorded.

[barnabas1969]

Whoop-dee-doo. We do this already... and I don't have to wait until the day after the show is aired... and it will do it for ANY copy-freely show, no matter what channel. I have many OTA channels in addition to my cable channels... and they are all copy-freely. My OTA channels include ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CW, TBN, ION, PBS, and a few other channels, Plus, most of my locals are sent over cable as copy-freely.

The "hopper" is over-hyped. It's a shame that nobody hyped Media Center as much.

[duffman984]

My fear with this lawsuit is that if the networks don't win their lawsuits then they'll try their hardest to make commercial detection impossible which will screw us in the end. Honestly I don't see the issue because their viewer numbers will still be accounted for when a recording is made since a tuner is active on that channel and they can still get their advertisement money based on those figures