At their Team Summit Retailer Conference over the weekend, Dish Network pulled back the curtain on a new flavour their latest HD DVR, the 722s. It’s got a built-in Slingbox, plus Clip + Sling and Slingcatcher functionality to boot. The pile of whip cream on that box of synergy awesomeness is a brand new HD UI; a built-in, Yahooified browser; and a new remote with a touchpad and trigger. There’s some other minor Dish stuff happening at the link too, if you’re interested, but this new box is the headliner—all that and a can of Buffalo Pringles. [Multichannel via Zatz Not Funny]
This is classic corporate espionage/sabotage at its finest. Dish Network is accusing News Corp.—which used to have a 39 percent stake in DirecTV and still provides its security tech—of hiring hacker Christopher Tarnovsky to break into Dish’s network, steal the security codes, and use them to make pirated cards to flood the black market. It sounds insane, but Tarnovsky admitted in court he was paid James Bond villain style, with US$20,000 cash payments mailed from Canada hidden inside “electronic devices.”
Two years after initially smacking down Echostar (now just Dish Network) in court for stepping on its patent for a “multimedia time warping system” (aka a DVR) Tivo has clinched final and lasting victory against the satellite provider. Dish Network subscribers won’t have to worry about losing their DVRs or seeing anything different though, since the current boxes are designed around Tivo’s patents (probably because they knew they were gonna go down in court). Update: Echostar/Dish is actually gonna take it all the way to the Supreme Court!
Time to focus, lots of dirty dishes to clean. Oooh look, a bubble! Wow, I can blow more bubbles? Yay! Bubble bubble bubble, bubble bubble bubble. I’m tired of blowing bubbles, let’s do Jumping Jacks! Yay! Jumping Jacks stink, let’s eat candy ’til we puke! Yay! So sick, so many dirty dishes, the best US$5 I ever spent. Firetruck! [Bubble Scrubber via Boing Boing]
Sling Media, the company that brought you the Slingbox and SlingPlayer software, has been bought by EchoStar. The corporation, which owns the DISH pay-TV network, has valued Sling Media at $380 million, and the sale should take place before the end of the year. Full press release is below.
AU: A change in management could, hopefully, mean a fresh expansion of the device into new territories. Well, we don’t get these boxes now, so any angle I can think of for a possible local launch sounds good to me. -SB
We got our hands on the Dish Network ViP722, making sure the next generation of satellite DVRs has plenty of storage space. Its makers have added hours of storage to this beast, now totalling 55 hours’ worth of 1080i or 720p HD video, or 350 hours of standard def. In addition, you can now plug in an external USB hard drive and keep swapping them out as you need more storage. If that’s not enough, you can also output video to a second television.
