Dish Network Gambles with "Hopper"

Dish’s "Hopper" is a digital video recorder that allows Dish customers to automatically hop past all the commercials on some prime-time network TV shows. Understandably, the TV networks aren't too happy about that, even if Dish customers might like the feature.


It's a gamble, to be sure. Consumers never claim to "like" commercials, but generally would rather view commercials if that means they get "no incremental cost" access to content they want. DVRs have been a threat, in that regard, and Hopper is one of the biggest threats so far, at least for major broadcaster prime-time fare, which Hopper will record automatically.


Dish Network therefore is gambling that it will gain more than it loses. The gains might come in the form of more subscribers and higher satisfaction. The losses will come if the networks retaliate against Dish in some significant ways. 


The growing tensions between programmers and video distributors are not going to end, and Hopper provides only one example of the building tensions within the video ecosystem. In a sense, Dish is gambling that the "surgical" approach, allowing users to skip virtually all commercials on broadcast network prime-time programs, will please customers more than it irritates the few affected networks.


Hopper would have faced across the board opposition had it proposed eliminating all commercials from all programming, automatically. Of course, that also is a theoretical impossibility, since the Hopper hard drive actually could not store all programming, in any case. 


But Hopper poses a threat to broadcaster advertising streams, depending on how popular it becomes.