Direct-to-home (DTH) satellite provider Dish (formerly Dish Networks) is playing to the mainstream U.S. TV viewer with its Hopper whole-home HD DVR, which it unveiled in January at CES2012 and formally launched last week.
Having picked up a handful of awards for Hopper at the Las Vegas event, Dish is now aiming to garner wins on the home front. In its favor is a longstanding comparative low price point and now added functionality. The Hopper not only enables whole-home DVR (with its Joey client units) but also a novel PrimeTime Anytime service, which can automatically record four primetime HD network channels and store them for up to eight days.
Customers can also manage the Hopper system online, and it interfaces Dish’s place-shifting Sling adapter, but the company is underscoring less multi-screen than traditional lean-back TV viewing, which after all remains the predominant consumer behavior.
A Hopper tchotske in the CES 2012 pressroom.
This launch is part of a larger effort to reverse the momentum at the number two U.S. based satellite video provider. With just under 14 million subscribers, Dish falls short of the DirecTV’s nearly 20 million subscriber total in the U.S. alone. (DirecTV serves another nearly 8 million in Latin America.) For two years, the companies have diverged in subscriber trajectories: DirecTV roughly doubled its net gains while Dish tripled its net losses year-over-year.
With 22,000 net additions announced in its Q4 results in early March, Dish may be righting its course. Yet with DirecTV having added 125,000 net U.S. additions in the same quarter, Dish is unlikely to catch its rival any time soon.
What Dish has relied upon in the past is a low price point. Its $19.99 12-month promotional offer is typically $10 less than DirecTV’s comparable offer. After a one-time multi-year increase announced in early 2011, Dish has continued to maintain its planned two-year price freeze. Where Dish has been unable to compete is on sport-based content, such as DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket and NASCAR HotPass.
In the recent earnings call, President and CEO Joseph Clayton, the former chairman of Sirius Satellite Radio who joined Dish in June 2011, emphasized the hopes embodied in the new products. “Going
forward, we want our Dish products to be perceived more like the mobile phone industry, with names like the RAZR, the iPhone and the Droid. So we’ve introduced new corporate mascots, Hopper and Joey, to symbolize a new era for Dish.â€
Clayton also said that the company would be less shy about promoting its technical innovations, such as its Sling-enabled TV Everywhere product and its new Blockbuster @Home streaming service. In its current advertisements, however, Dish is leaning on traditional TV viewing and the laid-back Hopper theme, here introducing the mascot in a ‘whole home’ setting using Boston brogue, and here playing up its relevance to the eternal struggle over the remote.
