Dish Network DVR Receiver

What's better than watching your favorite program on Dish Network satellite TV? Watching your favorite program whenever you feel like it. You can do that, plus pause a program at any time, go back to replay scenes you want to see again and jump past commercials and other content you don't care about. How do you do it? With a Dish Network DVR receiver.

The term DVR means Digital Video Recorder. Another popular name is PVR for Personal Video Recorder, although DVR seems to be the term that is becoming standard. A DVR is a lot like a VCR, but it doesn't use tapes and it doesn't record on DVDs or CD-ROMs. It's completely hard disk based. If that sounds like a computer, you're right. A DVR is really a combination of a satellite television receiver and a special purpose computer in one package.

The latest offering from Dish Network is the DVR 625 Dish Player - DVR System. It's a black box about the size of a small home theater receiver. Inside are two satellite TV tuners and a 120 GB hard drive. That may be bigger that the hard drive on your PC. Why such a big drive? It's to give you the ability to record up to 100 hours of TV programming.

Here's how it works. Dish Network programming is beamed to the dish antenna on your roof from high power satellites in stationary orbits above the equator. The signal format is all digital for both sound and picture. Two satellite tuners let you select which of many programs you want for one or two TV sets. That signal is then fed to the hard drive which is always recording whatever the tuners have selected. You can pause the program that you are watching and the disk will keep recording it for up to two hours on each receiver. When you take the program off pause, you haven't missed anything. The show picks up right where it left off.

Using a giant hard disk instead of tapes has some other advantages. First, the quality is exactly the same whether you are watching a live show or a recorded show. You can almost always tell the difference on tape. Second, in addition to pausing your show to take a break, you can also have it replay the scene you just saw in case you missed the joke or want to see the quarterback get sacked again. You can skip ahead on any program that you've recorded or have been holding on pause.

The DVR 625 lets you record two shows at once or record two shows and watch a third one that you have already recorded. You can use the on-screen programming guide to select a show you want to record later on. The 625 also has something called name-based recording. You pick any show and the DVR will find all the new episodes of that show and record them even if the program schedule changes. You'll never miss your favorites again.

If you want the latest in TV recording technology for regular non-HD television, you'll want to get the Dish Network DVR 625. Don't worry about how you'll pay for such a high tech receiver. The actual DVR 625 unit is free to you with a lifetime equipment warranty. Professional installation of the dish antenna, satellite signal cable and DVR 625 receiver is also free. All you have to do is pick your favorite Dish Network programming package and place your order. Pick America's Everything package and there is no monthly fee for the DVR service. Otherwise it's a modest $4.98 per month extra to use a DVR rather than a non-recording satellite receiver.

As of this writing you can get a special deal on Dish Network programming with a DVR 625 receiver. Your first month of service is free and you get 25 movie channels free for 3 months with programming packages that start at just $31.99 a month. If you want HD satellite receivers or HD DVRs, these are also available.