Dish Anywhere—Dish’s popular remote content viewing service that lets you watch linear, on-demand, and recorded content remotely—may soon be coming to a TV near you…wherever that happens to be. At CES 2017, Dish was showing off its first 10-foot interface for Dish Anywhere running on a Fire TV box. The demo included access to the full grid guide, your Sling-enabled Hopper DVR contents, and Dish’s available on-demand movies and shows.
The implications here are pretty big. For example, you could use a Fire TV box in your home as an extender to your DVR, perhaps replacing or supplementing some of the capabilities you may have through a Joey. We’re not expecting 4K video through the service anytime soon, but it could work fine for some use cases. Imagine a kitchen TV, for example. It’s a lot easier to plug a Fire TV Stick into the TV than worry about placing or mounting a set top box—even as small as the Joey actually is.
Or maybe you’re traveling. Savvy travelers are known to pack a Fire TV or Fire TV Stick. Both products enable “captive portal” Wi-Fi login, allowing you to connect your device through most hotel Wi-Fi systems. For under $40, you’d have easy access to your home TV service and DVR, including anything recorded automatically through Prime Time Anytime. Anywhere in the United States.
Dish doesn’t charge customers for its Dish Anywhere service, so we’re not anticipating that there will be any additional charge for this app or its services once it’s available. We don’t have a specific availability date for the Dish Anywhere app on the Fire TV—or if it will come to other platforms—but we’re anticipating this will be out sometime this year.