Appeals Court Upholds Dish Hopper DVR Ruling, Fox Loses Again In Court

Dish Network has had its Hopper whole home DVR system on the market for a long time now The Hopper system is interesting in that it not only records DVR programs that can be viewed on any TV in the home that is equipped with a Joey set top box, but it can also skip commercials automatically. That automatic commercial skipping tech has had TV studios in an uproar.

The angriest of the studios is Fox, which has been trying to get the courts to ban the Dish PrimeTime AnyTime and AutoHop technologies for a long time now. Fox lost the original court case with the judge rejecting Fox's request to block both of the Dish features.

PrimeTime Anytime is a service that the Hopper system has that automatically records every primetime show on the four major networks using one tuner, leaving the others available to record additional programs. AutoHop is a feature that allows the TV watcher to choose to remove all commercials from recorded shows when watched the day after they originally air.

That means the user has to do no fast forwarding, the Hopper DVR skips the commercials automatically. Fox took Dish to appeals court after losing the original case and that appeals court has upheld the original ruling. It's unclear at this time if Fox will appeal the ruling again.

SOURCE: Dish Network