New Hopper 3 DVR only lets you record 16 shows at once

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Such a disappointment - only 16 shows at a time.
Such a disappointment - only 16 shows at a time.
Photo: Dish TV

Cult of Mac CES 2016 full coverageYou now have a new buddy to enable you to binge watch TV like never before.

DishTV just rolled out the Hopper 3 DVR, which lets you record up to 16 programs at once. Sixteen! Consider that the first DVR player in 1999 only let you record one show at a time.

It seems like DishTV is putting its eggs in a basket that contrasts nicely with the Apple TV streaming model; the Hopper 3 will store all your shows for you and not have an effect on your bandwidth bottom line.

The Hopper 3, which is seven times more powerful than the Hopper 2, dropped jaws Tuesday night as it was revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

“I know you can’t think of 16 shows to record at once. Neither can I,” Dish TV’s Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kehmka said during a news conference late Tuesday afternoon. “But now we have taken recording conflict completely off the table.”

That, and the sports bar.

The Hopper 3, which will ship later this month, lets you play four live HD channels at once on a single 4K screen in what they call “Sports Bar Mode.”

This DVR is one speedy hopper with a quad-core Arm processor. It has a 2 TB internal storage, which can record 500 hours of HD content. It is also the first DVR with USB 3.0, which makes transfer speeds 10 times faster.

4K content from Netflix and Sony Pictures is available on the Hopper 3. DishTV also gave the new Hopper a cleaner user interface and a simplified search function that goes across various networks.

It does have its limits: it will only connect to seven televisions.

For TV watchers on the go, DishTV also introduced the HopperGo, a $99 compact WiFi video drive with 64 GB of memory that lets you watch up to 100 hours of content on your mobile device.

For more details on the Hopper 3, click here.

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