The option of live TV on-demand, freezing, and backspacing is one of the most valuable features delivered by contemporary pay TV market leaders like Dish Network. DVR receiver allows the Dish network users to pause the live television programs for up to 90 minutes. This provides one with a lot of opportunities to put on hold working on certain programs if something crops up or even to go back and repeat scenes that one had missed. Here is how the Dish Network’s pause live TV works: This section provides a detailed explanation of how this option works and any restrictions associated with the option.
What Do People Mean When They Mention Pausing Live TV?
Scheduling to Stop Live TV permits you to stop a program you are currently watching take a break and come back later to continue watching. For instance, you can stop watching a Sunday football game in the middle of the game only to be interrupted by the doorbell; then resume the match after about 15 minutes amidst the same commentary you stopped from. This helps you to avoid missing any event that goes on while you are away from your device.
The feature, which is known as Dish Network Live TV Pause, is the ability to pause and rewind live television shows.
To pause live TV on Dish Network, you will require a DVR receiver that is compatible with the equipment, and this may include the Hopper or Wally. As soon as you tune to a certain channel, the receiver will commence storing the video stream to the hard drive on a preemptive basis as a rolling buffer. This enables you to go back to what you have watched up to a specific point within an agreed number of days.
When the remote is pressed with a pause button, the video will stop or freeze in case you need to get up for a moment without stopping the program. The receiver goes on to store the video stream on standby so that you can start over from that point at another time. That is all it takes to resume watching, just hit the play button.
90-Minute Rewind Capacity
Not all Dish Network DVR receivers enable users to pause or rewind live TV playback beyond the point currently being broadcasted, but a majority of them allow this up to 90 minutes behind the present time. This 90-minute rewind capacity provides you with our high level of flexibility in that most programs can be rewound or even paused. For programs that are half an hour long, such as a sitcom, one and a half hours of buffer time should be enough to cover the entire show and the commercials. Even for longer events such as live sporting events you can rewind 90 minutes to review various portions of the event.
The 90-minute rewind time is possible with the Dish receiver using a section of the hard drive to store streams of live TV temporarily. This lets one record in the background and then access it at any time as a form of a personal video buffer.
What happens when one has to stop at the 90-minute mark?
90 minutes since the recording of the live TV show started the oldest parts of that live TV buffer get erased on a first-in-first-out basis. From this point on, you can fast forward or rewind the movie start but no earlier than 90 minutes to the current playback position. For practical purposes, the receiver has an extended 90-minute window of access to live television that progresses unabated. Anything that is slid out this window is wiped off to create space for new recordings to be made.
And if a football game is in progress and you pause it for 4 hours when you un-pause you can only go back to 90 minutes to before the un-pause not back to the initial stage when you paused the game.
Expanding the Pause Time with More Hard Drive Space
Although 90 minutes is the standard rewinding time, some Dish models provide a provision to increase this time with additional storage space. For instance, the Hopper 3 DVR has an upgrade option for up to 2 TB of storage plus an external hard drive. This increases the buffer for live TV pause from 90 minutes up to 150 minutes adding 1 hour of rewind time.
Be careful when selecting your Dish receiver and the external hard drive to use since they should be compatible. But getting more storage space is a good way to extend the amount of live television that can be buffered if you want more freedom in terms of being able to pause and rewind.
A few drawbacks of the Live TV Pause feature include
Dish's live TV pause ability is extremely useful - but there are a couple of limitations to note:
- It only works on the specific TV the receiver is physically connected to at a particular time. Thus, if you have client boxes in other rooms, you cannot begin to pause in one place and then continue in another place. It appears that the live TV buffer shares the same linear tuner as the main DVR unit.
- It means that when you switch to a different channel in live TV, all the content that was previously buffered is erased and the new channel begins to be buffered from there. So you cannot switch between programs or channels and have your pause points set on both of them – only the program or channel that is currently being watched possesses the pause feature at any one time.
- In the case of the DVR, the live TV buffer can be lowered or shut off when the DVR reaches its storage limit, and therefore, to regain more space for additional data, existing recordings must be erased. Check the free disk space on your DVR and make sure you have enough of it if you need the 90-minute rewind time without interruption.
In conclusion, while the points can be seen as its drawbacks, Dish Network offers great options for pausing and lately as well as live TV on the primary display. Suffice it to say, just be mindful that the 90-minute rewind capability solely depends on having a Dish receiver that is properly configured and backed up with sufficient memory storage. If you have proper tools you are going to get excellent control over the management of the live TV viewing.
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