If you're a DISh customer who happens to own an iPhone, your days of calling into customer service might be over. Today, Apple and DISH announced that DISH customer service can be reached using Messages on iOS through Apple Business Chat. CISH is the first pay-TV company to join Apple Business Chat, so it's getting in on the action early.
Everything these days seem to be driven by bots, specifically chatbots. That’s true whether they’re simply bots you type commands to or, more popularly, speak to. But despite the ubiquity and popularity of Google Assistant, our TVs, sometimes the first appliance to become smart in our houses, are still beholden to the decades-old remote control. If you own one of DISH’s Hopper family of receivers, that’s no longer true and you can take it easy even when you can’t find that elusive remote.
DISH is bringing Netflix into hotel rooms, helping travelers get the on-demand content they want without packing in their own Chromecast. The service is being added to DISH's Evolve system for hotels that it launched last year. According to the company, this makes DISH the nation's first major television service provider to offer a Netflix integration for hotels.
AirTV announced that their device will soon allow Local Channels DVR in their customer beta program. This feature is called Local Channels DVR and it'll be available for free to all AirTV Player users (in Beta form, anyway.) This feature is now one of two similar features, the other being Sling TV's in-app Cloud DVR, which also allows recorded OTA programming and recorded OTT content to be accessed by users at any time.
Dish Network customers will have access to 4K High Dynamic Range (HDR) coverage of the upcoming Winter Games in South Korea, the company has announced. The NBCUniversal content will be available in Ultra HD quality to anyone with a TV that supports the resolution, as well as HDR for those watching with a television that supports high dynamic range. Overall, Dish customers will get access to 2,400 hours of content.
Dish Network subscribers once again have access to CBS following the brief service blackout resulting from an expired contract between the two. The blackout happened late Monday night, the latest instance of CBS and Dish Network's business relations souring. Now, less than a week later, Dish has announced that it has signed a new multi-year carriage deal with CBS.
If manufacturers and tech companies are to have their say, everything will be controlled by voice in the not so distant future. And not just simple voice commands, mind, but smart voice recognition backed by natural language processing and machine learning. But as easy as simply uttering your command may be, there are still some things done faster with a single press of a button. That’s why DISH’s second gen voice remote for Hopper DVRs brings the best of both worlds together for the ultimate user experience convenience.
Earlier this year, DISH rolled out Alexa support to its Hopper and Wally set-top boxes. While that implementation likely covered a lot of DISH users, customers who use Joey boxes were unfortunately left out in the cold. That all changes today, as DISH has announced Alexa support for Joey clients as well.
Live television is undergoing a revolution, and while it is mostly a welcomed thing -- who doesn't like the idea of contract-free live TV streaming? -- it does have a downside: some of the new services are less-than-simple to navigate. While this may not be a problem for the youngest generation who will grow up exposed to these new-fangled interfaces, the experience is mostly just frustrating for everyone else. Thusly enters Sling TV's new traditional channel guide.