Dish Network’s Dish Explorer App Focused on iPad for Controlling Hopper

The Explorer app, a 17 MB file, was released in January to enable Hopper owners to use the iPad as a second screen to change channels and manage DVR recordings. It also provides details on popular and trending shows across Dish Network, offering the opportunity to chat about them on Facebook and Twitter. Dish Explorer also will recommend shows based on social media discussions and what people are watching. In sports, Dish partnered with discovery service Thuuz to determine which games are the most popular.

Dish Explorer was developed with EchoStar affiliate Sling Media, with an eye toward integrating it with the Sling-equipped Hopper DVR as well as the iOS and Android-compatible Dish Anywhere, that allows for transferring and viewing of programming on mobile devices and remote DVR recording. Rather than develop a separate Dish Explorer app for Android, Dish will deliver features of it such as search and discovery to Dish Anywhere for conversion to the Google software. Focusing on iPad speeds the Dish Explorer development process since there aren’t separate projects for other products, Sadler said. Digital Explorer is moving to release new software updates every two months, he said.

“This way I don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time and we are talking about aggregating all of the experiences together,” Sadler said. “We're just trying to find the pieces that resonate with our customers and by keeping it on iOS, I am on a two-month release schedule for new feeds, which you can’t do if you have to, as much as possible, maintain parity across several platforms. All the things you can do in Explorer are an example of what all the apps can do with Hopper."

The Dish Explorer app has had a “pretty good take rate” among iPad users that also own the Hopper, Sadler said. He declined to say how many times the free Dish Explorer app has been downloaded. While Explorer has a “good” discovery engine, “the one part we are going to beef up is what you do once you have found the content you want to watch” such as sharing it via social media, Sadler said.

Dish is continuing to sell the original Hopper with a one terabyte drive ($349), as it puts a major marketing push behind the Sling- and Wi-Fi-equipped model ($449) that doubles storage to two terabytes and increases flash memory to 2 GB from 750 MB, Sadler said. The Broadcom processor in the new Hopper nearly doubles clock speed to 1.3 GHz, from 750 MHz in the earlier model, and integrates Sling transcoder technology, Sadler said. The new box also adds Hopper Transfer that allows the user to transfer content recorded on the DVR to an iPad for playback and Bluetooth audio streaming. With the Transfers feature, the DVR is set to encode a recording in real-time into a file that can transfer wirelessly to an iPad. The Hopper also uses adaptive bit-rate technology from EchoStar’s Move Networks, which last year was moved into Dish Digital Holdings along with Dish’s Blockbuster Digital online business. Dish also is continuing to field the VIP 722 satellite receiver, despite having replaced the step VIP 922 with the Hopper product, company officials said. EchoStar stopped producing the 722, but is selling refurbished models for those subscribers requesting one, Dish officials said. While the 922 had one terabyte storage, the 722 had 500 GB. Amazon was selling the 722 at $274 Friday, down from $299.

Dish also is offering its dishNet satellite-based broadband service, both packaged with a video package and as a standalone service starting with a $49 monthly fee for a service offering 10 Mbps/1 Mbps downstream/upstream and a 20 GB data cap, a company spokesman said. A second plan with a $69 month fee offers 10 Mbps/2 Mbps and 30 GB. Dish had 183,000 dishNet subscribers as of Dec. 31, having added a new 44,000 in Q4, the company said. Dish has focused on selling the dishNet as a bundle both to generate more money and lessen the chance for churn, Dish has said. It also sought to avoid competing with EchoStar’s Hughes Communications HughesNet and ViaSat satellite broadband services. DishNet is using EchoStar’s EchoStar-17 and ViaSat’s ViaSat-1 satellites at 107.1 and 115 degrees west.