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More Is Better with Dish's Super Joey

Never watch live TV again

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Let's get one thing out of the way: Dish's new Super Joey is not the revolution in TV viewing that its Hopper with Sling was. Last year's big CES product from Dish turned out to be the easiest way to record your favorite TV shows and watch them on your favorite mobile device. Oh, it also lets you skip commercials on content from the major broadcast networks. You could say we really liked it.

But enough talk about the Hopper. We're here to discuss Dish's Super Joey, which expands on the Hopper's functionality. The original Joey was used to get your Hopper content onto another TV in your home, but added no extra tuners. What makes the Super Joey such a great product, then? It adds two more tuners to the Hopper experience, which means absolutely nothing to the average consumer, but gives you a noticeable benefit: the ability to record two additional TV shows simultaneously.

The main benefit of getting a Joey is to give a second TV access to all your Dish content.

The original Hopper with Sling allows for up to six channels to record at the same time, meaning you can record up to eight at once with a Super Joey. We need to point out a slight caveat, though: You can record eight channels simultaneously only if you opt to record ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. Think of it this way:

  • The Hopper with Sling has three tuners and the new Super Joey has two.
  • Each tuner can record one channel except...
  • In order to record the four major broadcast networks simultaneously (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC), you only need one tuner.
  • If you want to record content on all of those channels, that leaves you with four tuners left, or four additional channels.
  • If you want to record cable channels exclusively, you may only record five shows at once.

Let's say you record primetime content every night between 8PM and 11PM. Let's also say that every show you record is an hour long. That's three hour-long TV shows per channel. With the ability to record eight shows simultaneously, you will end up with a whopping 24 TV shows on your Hopper to watch anytime you want. Starting to see why this is a big deal?

Many Dish subscribers might not even need the Super Joey. The main benefit of getting any of Dish's Joeys in the first place is to give a second TV access to all your Dish content—kind of like a second cable box. If you only have one TV, you could theoretically get a Super Joey just for the additional two tuners it adds.

Like I said earlier, the Dish Super Joey isn't going to change the way you watch TV like the Hopper with Sling did. It will, however, give you even more options—who's going to complain about that?

The Super Joey's release date will be announced sometime during Q1 of this year. Pricing information hasn't been released yet, but we would expect it to be similar to the original Joey, which costs $7/month on top of a Dish Hopper subscription.

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