ViP receiver screensaver nothing but Hopper advertisements now

pattykay

formerly crodrules
Original poster
Jun 14, 2014
8,620
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North Central Ohio
I am sorry if this has already been discussed, but I glanced through the recent thread titles and did not see anything about this. Has anyone else noticed that the screensaver on the ViP receivers has been changed so that it is now only advertisements trying to get people to upgrade to a Hopper? At least, that is the way it is now on my ViP222k. I am not sure exactly when this changed, since my dad is usually the one who uses the ViP222k, but I just noticed it today. Is this the first step towards forcing subscribers with ViP receivers to upgrade?
 
Not the case (yet) on my 722k...
Okay, it must just be certain models, then. I know that Dish has been wanting to phase out the 222's for awhile, so it makes sense that they would start with those.

Since not everyone is seeing these messages on their ViP receivers yet, I will post the text of the messages here, just in case you were curious:

"Upgrade to the Hopper receiver. Enjoy access to On Demand, up to 500 hours of HD recording space, Free Voice Remote, and more! Call 866-974-5202."

"Upgrade to the Hopper receiver and unlock up to 80,000+ On Demand movies & shows available for free, rent, or purchase. Call 866-974-5202."

"Record multiple shows at once and store up to 500 hours of HD TV all with the Hopper receiver - upgrade today! Call 866-974-5202."

"Upgrade to the Hopper receiver and get our Voice Remote included! Search by channel, show, actor, and more with the power of your voice. Call 866-974-5202."

These same four messages run in a loop.
 
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I am sorry if this has already been discussed, but I glanced through the recent thread titles and did not see anything about this. Has anyone else noticed that the screensaver on the ViP receivers has been changed so that it is now only advertisements trying to get people to upgrade to a Hopper? At least, that is the way it is now on my ViP222k. I am not sure exactly when this changed, since my dad is usually the one who uses the ViP222k, but I just noticed it today. Is this the first step towards forcing subscribers with ViP receivers to upgrade?

I think I have the screen saver disabled. I never have seen that.
 
I think I have the screen saver disabled. I never have seen that.

I don't think you can disable it. It usually has info that changes, sometimes what upcoming shows you have set to record, tips, and it all moves around the screen to prevent burn in. At the bottom in yellow it says "Your receiver is currently off. Press SAT to watch tv.
 
I think the VIP screen saver is going to have advertisements telling people who will need to call the 866-974-5202 phone number and plus the VIP receivers are going to be phased out and will have to be forced to upgrade to the hopper 3 because I was at restaurant there in Nevada that has dish network and therefore they will have to do an upgrade or they will lose the channels they have if they don't upgrade.
 
Okay, thanks everyone! I think we have established that these messages are only appearing on the ViP222 series for now, so perhaps the thread title should be changed to "ViP222k screensaver nothing but Hopper advertisements now" to be more accurate.
 
I wish you could disable the screen savers on Dish receivers, but I've never found a way to do so.
At least the Wally screensaver seems to be down to only one possible screen now, "Remote Finder." Although I do occasionally get a glitch during a Guide download that causes the screensaver to only display the Wally logo bouncing around the screen after the download is finished. Either way is an improvement if you do not like seeing the advertisements that usually show up in the Hopper screensaver. :D
 
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I've never seen a screen saver on any of my DISH receivers. I guess my question would be "what is the advantage of leaving your TV on if you're not watching it?". Do some people just enjoy watching screen savers?
 
I've never seen a screen saver on any of my DISH receivers. I guess my question would be "what is the advantage of leaving your TV on if you're not watching it?". Do some people just enjoy watching screen savers?
I have had more than one TV start to go bad, to the point where it would keep working fine as long as I left it turned on, but if I turned it off it would be very difficult to get it to turn back on again.

More to the point of this thread, there was an advantage to the ViP screensaver where I could watch it to make sure the receiver was not busy doing a guide download in the background, before turning the receiver back on. I stumbled across this by watching TV on a ViP211 in the middle of the night, at the time of the nightly reset. If I turned the receiver back on right away, I would have to wait for it to re-acquire the signal, download the guide, etc. before I could watch TV again. If I waited and watched the screensaver until the "Press Info to go to channel 101" "Press Info to go to channel 500" and the list of Pay-Per-View movies returned, the receiver would work right away. So I figured out that the guide download must be happening while those screens are still missing from the screensaver. After that, I got in the habit of always turning the TV on first, before turning the receiver on, to check the screensaver. This habit still comes in handy on Wally and Hopper receivers, to make sure that they are not in the middle of a guide download, software download, etc. although their screensavers will specifically state what is happening in those cases. With this change to the ViP222k screensaver, my trick to see if the receiver is busy with a guide download by watching the screensaver no longer works, since the old screensaver screens no longer exist. :(