Advanced Television

EchoStar’s ‘Hopper’ win restored, but litigation continues

February 1, 2013

By Chris Forrester

dish-hopperEchoStar’s Dish ‘Hopper with Sling’ ad-skipping device has been belatedly given its ‘Best of CES’ Award, and former awards sponsor CNET has been turfed out of CES as part of the fall-out over the scandal. (CNET had reversed the granting of the award under pressure from owners CBS).

However, Fox Network as well as NBC, ABC and CBS, all continue to litigate against Dish’s AutoHop technology and despite a strong steer in a January 27th Court hearing that any verdict that supported the main broadcasts would be a major reversal of current copyright laws.

A meeting was scheduled to take place this week between the assorted litigants and at one stage confidence was high that a settlement could be achieved. Not so, say insiders, and the litigation continues.

Some facts have emerged from the submissions to the Court, notably that as at September 31st it was fewer than 1 million out of Dish’s 14 million subs that had AutoHop installed, and the number of users was even less.

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