I do have to say this, it's very easy to spend other people's money. Just because a certain setup works for one person, that doesn't mean it will work for everyone else, and just saying yeah go ahead and spend more money to start and per month is not the right way to help people out.
Example. My parents have a total of 8 TV's in their house. With that said alone you would think 2-3 hoppers is what they need. If there are only 2 people in the house, and they don't DVR everything, there is really no need for 2-3 hoppers. Knowing their use case they would never need more than 3 tuners, and anything more would be a waste.
With that said, and as many others have said, it would depend on your use case. Think about how many people are in your house, how many TV's are on at a time, are they on different channels or the same channel? Now those same questions and add how many different shows would you want to record and what time do they come on? If the answer is more than 3 at the same time, then 2 hoppers might be what you need. Example, if you want to record two different shows that come on the same time, and you have two people that would want to watch 2 different shows while those recordings happen, then you might need 2 hoppers unless you can move the recording of that show to a later time in the day where they might show an encore of it a few hours later. There again, how often a week would that happen? My use case, 3 tv's (4 if you want to count the computer in kitchen that uses dishanywhere at time), and one night a week I will have 2-3 shows at the same hour that want to record, but I or my wife might be watching something else. Fortunately one of those shows comes back on at 10pm so it can be pushed off until then if necessary. If that happened more than once a week, or if the shows don't come back on at another time, then I would lean towards another hopper.
