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Dish's crazy watch-four-shows-at-once Hopper 3 DVR is now available

Dish's crazy watch-four-shows-at-once Hopper 3 DVR is now available

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Dish's new Hopper 3 DVR, which lets 4K TV owners watch four shows simultaneously thanks to the 16 tuners inside, is now available to all of the satellite company's customers. "Sports Bar Mode" is the feature that splits your on-screen picture into four quadrants; you choose which one to hear audio from.

The Hopper 3 also puts a bigger focus on 4K content, with movies from Sony and Netflix — once the Netflix app is ready in a few weeks. Netflix is being added to Dish's universal search, so you'll see streaming movies and shows pop up alongside DVR recordings and rentals. Dish's latest DVR can be linked with up to six of the company's smaller Joey boxes, so you can have a total of seven TVs throughout the house.

There's no upfront cost for those who want the Hopper 3, but you've got to be paying the $15 "whole-home DVR" fee to get it, and each Joey box (including the 4K model that is only now finally launching) demands its own $7 fee. Sadly if you've got a 1080p TV, you don't get to use Sports Bar Mode. But if you do, it seems silly not to upgrade. Sure, cramming 16 tuners into one DVR makes us think of a certain Onion article, but it's at least putting all those UHD pixels to good use.