If you’re like me, when you and your brood of 16 children sit down to watch television of an evening, you end up at an impasse? Not everyone wants to watch the Duggars marathon for the fiftieth time and the little ones want to watch Disney while the older ones want to watch Faces of Death again. What to do? Thankfully, Dish announced that they’re finally shipping the Super Joey, a DVR that can record eight shows at once.
Dish has been making some interesting moves in the whole-home video space of late and this is only the latest in their array of base stations (called the Hopper) and remote devices (the Joeys). The Super Joey adds two tuners to the standard Joey, allowing you to record four programs at once as well as four channels of prime time TV on ABS, CBS, Fox, and NBC.
The question, ultimately, is whether or not services like Dish and the cable companies will withstand the onslaught of a la carte video. With services like Hulu and Aereo eating up eyeballs and Netflix and Amazon becoming content producers, set-top boxes are about as compelling as printed magazines and CDs. However, for that vast (but shrinking) swathe of humanity without fast, dependable Internet, dishes, antennae, and cables still make the most sense. But even as Dish adds tuners galore, how long will it last?