Dish Network HopperGO Review (2024)

Dish has made it easy to watch DVR content on the go for a few years now, thanks to the Hopper with Sling ($265.00 at Amazon) (now the Hopper 3 ($295.00 at Amazon) ) and the Dish Anywhere app. But this solution requires an Internet connection. The new HopperGO removes that limitation. The $99 HopperGO box is a small portable storage device for your Dish Network DVR recordings. Load it up by connecting it to your Hopper via USB, and you have a tiny drive full of shows you can watch on your mobile device through its own local wireless network. But it's rather pricey for what is essentially a 64GB memory card, and copy protection means you can't take all of your recordings with you.

Design
The HopperGO is a 2.6-inch wide, 0.7-inch thick black plastic square with rounded corners, about half the size of a smartphone. The front panel holds a single power button and indicator light, while around back, there are USB and micro USB connectors alongside a pinhole reset button. It weighs just 2.4 ounces, making it small and light enough to fit into nearly any pocket. The drive is thoroughly Dish-branded, with a HopperGO logo on top, a Dish logo on the front, and a red stripe around the sides that give it the same style as the most recent Hopper and Joey set-top boxes.

The GO contains 64GB of flash storage, which can hold up to 100 hours of DVR recordings. Dish claims it can last around four hours between battery charges, which is rather low compared with most of the smartphones and tablets with which you would use it. You can keep the HopperGO powered over USB if you don't want to worry about juice, but that requires either an external battery or a power outlet.

Using the HopperGO
You connect the HopperGO directly to your Hopper with the included USB cable in order to fill it up. When it's plugged in, the Hopper's on-screen menu will direct you to install the free Dish Anywhere app onto your smartphone or tablet if you haven't already. This is the same app used to remotely access DVR recordings on your Hopper or watch live television out of the house with Sling-powered place-shifting.

Loading the HopperGO takes place entirely through the Dish Anywhere app's DVR tab (the same one that lets you stream your DVR recordings to your mobile device over the Internet). Each recording in this tab has three options: Watch, Delete, and Transfer. Tapping Transfer lets you copy that recording to your mobile device's on-board storage or to your HopperGO if it's connected. Transfers will queue automatically and upload to the HopperGO individually. If it isn't connected, the queue will stay in place for when you plug it in.

Watching recordings from the HopperGO requires connecting to the device's own ad hoc Wi-Fi network. Once your mobile device is connected, the viewing experience is identical to watching a DVR recording you transferred to your mobile device. You can browse the contents of your HopperGO through the Transfers tab on the Dish Anywhere app, tap Watch, and it will play. The Dish Anywhere app and Hopper convert recordings to a lower-resolution format when you transfer them to the HopperGO, just like when you transfer them to your smartphone or tablet over the app. Dish won't release technical details of the transcoded video, so the effective resolution of transferred recordings is unknown.

Copy Protection
The HopperGO is compliant with all copy protection limitations required by the Hopper itself, the Dish Anywhere app (and mobile device recording Transfer feature), and various networks. In fact, the HopperGO seems to be little more than a wireless USB drive with all of the signatures and DRM features it needs to play nice with the Hopper. On one hand, it means paying a premium to get around a series of roadblocks put in place by the very people you're paying in order to view content in additional ways. On the other hand, it lets you view that content in additional ways when there are no other legal or technically feasible options.

Most Dish recordings can be transferred fairly freely to the HopperGO. However, I saw several notifications that a recording (often a movie on a premium channel, like HBO) would be deleted from the Hopper if I transferred it to the HopperGO, and saw even more warnings that I could only transfer a given show or movie once, even if it would stay on the Hopper. These are the same limitations you'll see when copying a recording to your smartphone or tablet.

Those limitations aside, the HopperGO supports simultaneous playback on up to five mobile devices. That's one of the few specific benefits it offers over simply transferring your recordings to your smartphone or tablet, as various restrictions mean you may or may not copy content to more than one device.

Conclusions
The Dish Network HopperGO is a useful gadget for a handful of specific situations. If you have a reliable Internet connection wherever you go (mobile data plan, office network, hotel Wi-Fi), you probably don't need it. Nor do you need it if your smartphone or tablet has tons of storage, since you can just transfer recordings to your device and watch with the Dish Anywhere app anyway. But if you have limited storage space and can't count on a good Internet connection at all times, the HopperGO can certainly come in handy. I found it useful during my daily commute, since my smartphone and tablet are both typically full, and I can't get a signal underground on the subway. The HopperGO let me catch up on my favorite shows on my way to work. If you're a Dish subscriber and find yourself in a similar usage scenario, it's worth checking out.