1. Not a matter of being or not being fixed. With DISH you never could be in the process of recording, leave the channel and come back to where you were, or leave the actual recording and come back to where it was. Only after the program is finished recording. If that is a huge deal get Direct as I believe you can do that with them.
Every service (with DVR) I've ever had can do this.
2. An external hard drive, which has to be self powered and not by the USB port, is for moving recorded material and you can not record directly to it. I did not think you could record directly to an external drive with Direct, but if you think you can do that with every other provider as you say, and it is very important to you, I wouldn't get DISH. At no time could ever record directly to the EHD I don't see it changing.
Yes, you can on DirecTV (and every other service I've had...right now I have WOW! and it does it as well). I had DirecTV and it was just plug and play. Self-powered isn't a big deal, but having to constantly transfer shows if I run out of space might be a big deal. (Note that I use the word "constantly" somewhat facetiously, as I get that it's probably not that common of an occurrence. But I HAVE run out of room with 2TB's of space before).
3. Yes you can get the receivers you mentioned for three rooms. If you want more rooms a second Hopper would be the way to go and may be required. Personally a second Hopper is the only way I would use a whole home set-up otherwise if the one Hopper dies you have no TV.
Thanks, but again, is one dying that common of an issue? I had one of my original Tivo units fail (out of 4) long ago, and never any other, from any other service including Comcast, Verizon FIOS, DirecTV, Uverse, and now WOW. Should I be worried about this?
4. NHL channel is indeed part of the Top 200 and Top250. But remember like any provider that is always subject to change.
Noted.
5. I can't answer if having satellite internet would affect those features of the Hopper that require the internet. My guess is not really, at least not from an internet speed standpoint. Perhaps the lag would have an effect.
My biggest fear with satellite internet is that I've read that while it may be "rated" at 12Mbps, many users often find themselves getting 2-3 in reality, which is too slow for many things, including Netflix, etc. I just don't want that to hobble the Hopper's capabilities (or Genie's, or whatever's).
If you did not know the locals sports channel(s) (RSN) are not in HD full time. The live pro game will almost always be in HD, but other programming and reruns of the game will be SD.
I didn't know this. You say the live game will be in HD...does that including recordings of that live game? Or are all recordings done in SD also?
Dish phone support is indeed horrible much of the time though getting through to them normally does not take long. On the other hand the DISH support team here (DIRT) is better than you can get from most any company.
I didn't even contact their phone support, it was via chat.