Just to show how this 'fear' of CSR's doing something wrong when its the only option that they can offer you as long as you don't downgrade your package to dish family which has no HD.
Anyone have a hopper and 3 Joey's, or any setup of hopper/Joey's totaling 4 TV's, wanna do a little experiment?
Call in to dish, tell them you're not satisfied with the hopper/Joey setup, and ask to downgrade to VIP receivers. Then tell them you're gonna discuss it with the spouse and report what they offered you here.
Ironically, this is the exact situation I'm in. We have 4 TVs, three Joey's and the Hopper. My kids both watch TV in their rooms and then if one of them is recording a show, we're SOL on the other two TV's. We have to kick one of the kids off their TV's or stop a recording just so we can watch anything.. be it recorded or live. It's simply NOT WORKING.
I came home from work to a very PO'd wife last night. She was watching a show on Animal Planet with about a half hour buffered and the TV switched WITHOUT WARNING to recording another show. She lost her buffer and the rest of the show and gained a lot of anger, which so ever-so-considerably saved for my rear end when I walked in the door.
At first, Dish seemed very understanding and wanted to help me out since the system isn't everything we thought it would be. I suggested to the CSR that they send us out some independent boxes for my kids rooms so they wouldn't tie up every friggin tuner in the house recording Sponge Bob and iCarly (which are on like a hundred times a day, btw).
Turns out, all they are willing to do is send out a VIP and three solos (increasing our MRC by adding on three more DVR fees) or give us a $200 upgrade to a second hopper. It's important for us to have multiple tuners available on two TV's.. my bedroom and the family room. We like to skip between tuners during commercial breaks in the bedroom more than record, so we're kinda in a spot. I just paid $200 to disconnect from DirecTV in contract and I'm not budgeted to spend another $200 for a second hopper... ask me about buyers regret.
My biggest mistake when we made the decision to switch back to Dish was NOT coming here to research on the hopper system. I work for a telcom that uses the same Mocha technology, but our "joey boxes", we call Satellites, have independent viewing tuners... that means, they watch programming on their own tuner and only use the main box for viewing what has been recorded. It's the same ultimate whole-home system that I bought into based on the Dish commercials, when it's anything but.
I don't understand why it's not possible to run two independent receivers in the same house that the Hopper is running.. it makes no sense.
Bottom line, there's nowhere near enough tuners in this setup to be considered a whole-home solution, and we are very unhappy and now stuck in another contract for services that don't meet our needs.
Any ideas???