Dish Anywhere on Apple TV

[HipKat]

I saw on Reddit that it's finally available for Apple TV users!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Cool!

About time we have been testing it for a long long time.

 

[syphix]

Works much better (faster, at least) than any of my Android TV boxes. Very nice.

 

[Foxbat]

Wow, thanks for letting us know! I’m trying it out now, watching “Twelve O’Clock High” I was finally able to record after putting the Timer in over three years ago.

The controls seem to work nicely with the AppleTV remote. The video quality looks as good as from my Joey, and over the Gigabit LAN inside our home it’s pretty solid. The Guide looks better than I remember the Hopper/Joey UI looking.

I will be interested trying this later from outside the home during vacation.

 

[Peter Parker]

Is Roku next?

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Is Roku next?

Unfortunately no.

 

[gasman882001]

Would be nice if now they would spend some time getting the bugs out of the Amazon Stick software!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Would be nice if now they would spend some time getting the bugs out of the Amazon Stick software!

What kind of bugs are you seeing?

Maybe start a new Dish Anywhere for FireTV Stick Bugs thread as the team that makes that software is active here. The more bug reports we can get for them, the better!

 

[RTCDude]

So I tried out the Dish Anywhere Apple TV app. I am very underwhelmed. The UI is almost nothing like the H3 interface. There are almost no settings for configuring it. For example, you can’t set whether the Guide list goes up of down. And it always in dark mode.

Navigation is very clumsy. Yes, there are limited buttons on the ATV remote that could make it hard to map the same H3 functionality. But other than up/down/left/right movement, there are non-structured movements to get to the Guide, DVR, or Streaming. Plus, it seems easy to get stuck in some mode that it’s non-obvious to get out of. The UI also doesn’t make full use of swiping (fast forward, reverse, etc).

Add to all of this ATV’s goofy keyboard makes doing things like searches or entering channel numbers extremely tedious. The ATV interface has methods to forward keyboard input to another local device, but this isn’t used. The keyboard also has a annoying 1/2 second timeout, so if think just a bit too long, you get to start all over again.

Lastly, at times where there was a slight video degradation in either res or color balance (for the exact same TV used with H3).

So does it work? Yes. But it is a very poor substitute for going through the H3 directly. This is an obvious attempt to ATVize the H3 interface. But it fails because it completely changes what Dish users already know with a foreign, confusing, and simplistic interface. It COULD be so much better, but it would take a lot of work and redesign.

I could go on but I’m not going to waste the time. I would only use app as some kind of last resort, if at all.

 

[Foxbat]

I see it as a way to expand my options while on vacation. An AppleTV 4K doesn’t take up much room in my Pipe-Full-o-Fun-Kit #7 (my bag of techno-goodies) and I have tested watching DVR and OTA content. We will see how well this works outside of our home.

 

[MikeD-C05]

Unfortunately no.

What do they have against Roku?

 

[cpdretired]

What do they have against Roku?

Firestick also.

 

[KAB]

Firestick also.

WadaUmean? Until now, they were the exclusive device.

 

[Jim5506]

So I tried out the Dish Anywhere Apple TV app. I am very underwhelmed. The UI is almost nothing like the H3 interface. There are almost no settings for configuring it. For example, you can’t set whether the Guide list goes up of down. And it always in dark mode.

Navigation is very clumsy. Yes, there are limited buttons on the ATV remote that could make it hard to map the same H3 functionality. But other than up/down/left/right movement, there are non-structured movements to get to the Guide, DVR, or Streaming. Plus, it seems easy to get stuck in some mode that it’s non-obvious to get out of. The UI also doesn’t make full use of swiping (fast forward, reverse, etc).

Add to all of this ATV’s goofy keyboard makes doing things like searches or entering channel numbers extremely tedious. The ATV interface has methods to forward keyboard input to another local device, but this isn’t used. The keyboard also has a annoying 1/2 second timeout, so if think just a bit too long, you get to start all over again.

Lastly, at times where there was a slight video degradation in either res or color balance (for the exact same TV used with H3).

So does it work? Yes. But it is a very poor substitute for going through the H3 directly. This is an obvious attempt to ATVize the H3 interface. But it fails because it completely changes what Dish users already know with a foreign, confusing, and simplistic interface. It COULD be so much better, but it would take a lot of work and redesign.

I could go on but I’m not going to waste the time. I would only use app as some kind of last resort, if at all.

When Dish bought Sling, the Sling equipment was very good and even had virtual remotes that mimicked the Dish remotes, but Dish threw that all away, doing their own thing and the mess we have now is part of that. Sloppy performance and inept controls. Maybe someone with a lick of sense will pull the sling original code out of whichever trash bin it was relegated to and offer a viable streaming option once again.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

What do they have against Roku?

It does not support the encryption that DA uses.

 

[gasman882001]

What kind of bugs are you seeing?

Maybe start a new Dish Anywhere for FireTV Stick Bugs thread as the team that makes that software is active here. The more bug reports we can get for them, the better!

Welp talked to my daughter who uses an amazon firestick to see what are her main concerns. And before anyone asks, her internet is over 300mbps and I have fiber where the receiver is located with way over 300mbps up and down. She says that lately the shows will buffer about half way through and have to restart and a very annoying one is when about 5 mins left in the show and it totally hangs up and then says the show is over. For both, getting out of the app and then back in, restart the show, slowly fast forward , and then it usually works.

 

[Almighty1]

Problems are to be expected as:
Apple TV = iOS = FreeBSD OS with a Mach kernel
Hopper = Linux OS
Amazon Firestick = Amazon modified Android OS which is also Linux kernel based

 

[Almighty1]

It does not support the encryption that DA uses.

And in reality, it's more than that as RokuOS is based on the Linux kernel which is where the encryption needs to be added and not the user level. Remember DISH is technically a business competitor to Roku so in the best interest of Roku, they are not going to add the encryption support needed for a competitor.

 

[Foxbat]

I see it as a way to expand my options while on vacation. An AppleTV 4K doesn’t take up much room in my Pipe-Full-o-Fun-Kit #7 (my bag of techno-goodies) and I have tested watching DVR and OTA content. We will see how well this works outside of our home.

Well, I am happy to report that I was able to sign into my Hopper 3 from 300 miles away (as the Volvo drives; a crow could fly here in fewer miles but its wings would be tired)! The picture quality was pretty good, which begs the question: When I tune into a subscribed channel via DishAnywhere, is the bitstream coming from satellite via our Hopper 3, or is it coming direct from Dish’s servers? The quality seemed too good to have come upstream from our ADSL connection at home.

Obviously, if I stream an event from the DVR or use the OTA tuner it has to come from our Hopper, but I am wondering whether Dish cut out the middle man for other Live content?

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Not at my Apple TV right now but many channels are now streamed directly from the channel instead of from your Hopper.

Those that are not streamed from your hopper will show a green wavy line next to it showing that it’s streaming and not from your hopper.

Example from my iPhone below.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk