All Americans are in Dish’s debt. The satellite TV distributor has solved the great challenge of modern life: that of dragging your fat, greasy hand out of the bag of crisps, picking up the remote for the digital video recorder and fast-forwarding through the ads. Free at last!
Dish’s Hopper set-top box records the entire primetime line-up automatically each night and saves it for viewing later, advertisements removed. Three of the companies that produce that programming (News Corp, Comcast, and CBS) have greeted this breakthrough with a lawsuit, alleging that it amounts to an unauthorised video-on-demand service pushing stolen programming. This could undermine the “quality of primetime programming” by undercutting the advertising revenues that support it.