How Dish Records Six Programs with Three Tuners

Jan 15, 2012 by Richard Gunther

Earlier last week at CES, Dish Network announced its new Hopper DVR set top box, which was capable of recording six programs simultaneously on a three-tuner box. This had us scratching our heads a bit, and further confusing the issue was Dish’s disclaimer that this was only true during prime time!

We stopped by Dish’s booth and asked for a demonstration and explanation of this tuner wizardry. The answer is rather ingenious: you can set up your Hopper DVR to automatically record the four major networks’ prime time lineup—every night. The Hopper pulls all four networks through one transponder, leaving you with two tuners during prime time hours to record anything else. At any other time of day, all three tuners are available for use.

This feature, called PrimeTime Anytime, keeps eight days’ worth of programming on a separate drive partition, so it doesn’t impact the available space for your own recorded shows. If you can’t watch one of the PrimeTime shows within the eight days, you can save it to your Recorded TV. And if you choose not to enable PrimeTime Anytime, you can use all three tuners at any time of day.

PrimeTime Anytime will be available on Hopper boxes at no additional cost.

Watch the PrimeTime Anytime walkthrough below or on our YouTube channel.