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Dish: Prime Time TV, No Ads; Can They Get Away With That?

This article is more than 10 years old.

Dish Network today announced a new feature for its satellite TV subscribers that seems destined to make it the most hated company in the television business.

The new feature, called Auto Hop, is being offered as part of the company's Hopper whole-home HD DVR system. What it does is let you automatically skip all commercials for prime time television from the four major broadcast networks when you watch the day after the programs are first aired.

"Viewers love to skip commercials," Vivek Khemka, vice president of DISH Product Management, said in a statement. "With the Auto Hop capability of the Hopper, watching your favorite shows commercial-free is easier than ever before. It's a revolutionary development that no other company offers and it's something that sets Hopper above the competition."

Hopper, launched in mid-March, allow viewers to record up to six shows at once, while playing back HD content in up to four rooms. Auto Hop extends the company's Hopper's PrimeTime Anytime function, which allows users to record all prime time programming on the four major networks - ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox - with one click.

Hopper stores the shows for eight days after airing. Ergo, what you get is a running set of prime-time programming, about 100 hours of prime time TV, stored on your DVR, that you can watch commercial free. Whee!

The feature allows you to start watching the shows you've recorded starting at 1 a.m. Eastern Time the day after a show has been recorded. Before that, you can watch using the Hopper system's 30-second "hop forward" feature to skip through ads. Dish notes that Auto Hop does not work on live broadcasts.

Craig Moffett, who covers the cable and telco business for Bernstein Research, concludes that Dish clearly hates all advertising. (Note that Dish recently announced that it plans to drop AMC, the network best known as the home for Mad Men, from its channel line up for cost reasons.)

"At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Dish introduced a new Prime Time Anytime service that automatically records all primetime programming from the Big Four broadcast networks with the push of a button," he notes. "Broadcasters couldn't have been thrilled. Today, they announced that they will go a step further. Their Auto Hop feature enables subscribers to automatically skip commercials when viewing broadcast TV shows next day. (Dish wryly observes that 'customers love to skip commercials.')"

Moffett notes that its going to be hard for Dish to maintain good relationships with its programming affiliates when they start offering a feature intended to cut out the bulk of the affiliates' revenues. He points out that Auto Hop is the latest in a long line of broadcaster-unfriendly (but pro-consumer) features from Dish, including the 30-second commercial skip button, and Slinbox, which let's you watch programming outside the intended market via the Internet.

Moffett adds that whether the auto-skip feature can withstand legal challenge "remains to be seen." He notes that the feature looks a lot like one offered by ReplayTV, a defunct company that once competed head-to-head with TiVo. Moffett recalls that ReplayTV was sued by the networks for their commercial skipping feature, but that the company went bankrupt before the case could be decided.

"Given the already long list of industry-unfriendly features promoted by Dish, one wonders if Auto Hop will be the final straw that provokes legal action from the broadcast networks," he writes. "While we aren't qualified to comment on the legal specifics, it's likely that the merits of any legal action would come down to the technical specifics of how the commercial skipping takes place. The courts generally allow consumers to manipulate content that they've paid for as they see fit. But distribution companies can't do the manipulating for them. We suspect Auto Hop probably uses some sort of bookmarking insertion based on automated recognition of commercial inserts (called 'fingerprinting'), which if true could certainly be argued to be a manipulation of the content stream by the distributor."

Dish shares are up 56 cents, or 1.9%, to $30.85.