CES Echostar Dish Network VIP 922 -- The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

While at CES, I stopped by the Dish Network booth to see what was new, and I got a peek at their new HDTV DVR set top box with Sling technology -- the ViP-922. It's pretty cool, but there are pros and cons. Here's my take:

The GOOD -- Building in Sling is great. Now people can watch their recorded shows from their PC when they're travelling as long as they have a broadband Internet connection. They've also upped the storage to a terabyte (whoopee!). As before, they still provide shared access to the same PVR content for up to two experiences (e.g. Living room and bedroom simultaneously). A less obvious "good" thing is that integrating Sling means that it's the second experience (e.g. bedroom) that gets taken over by the remote viewer, whereas if you added a Sling box to a previous set top, you were stuck with the main TV viewing being taken over by the remote experience.

The BAD -- Since they only only have two "experiences," you can't have two people watching at home AND be watching out of the home. For many people this won't be an issue, but for larger families that frequently have multiple TVs on at once, it won't be any fun when the family traveller takes over one of their experiences and they battle for the remote across state or even country boundaries.

The UGLY -- You only get half of the 1TB of hard disk for your recorded shows because the other half is allocated to video-on-demand shows that DISH puts on your hard drive in hopes you'll pay to watch them individually. This boggles the mind. In an age when more and more on-demand video content, some of it even in HDTV, is being delivered streamed over the Internet, this seems incredibly backward. I challenged the booth staffer on this, and he acknowledged that they were considering streaming as an alternative, but I didn't leave with high hopes.

According to the folks in the booth, the box will be available in the second half of 2009, and with any luck, by then, they will have realized the error of their ways, and offer a streaming on-demand solution instead of a dead-end, half-full hard-drive.