There is a glitch in DISH Anywhere that breaks it on Mac and PC, after replacing your DISH Hopper DVR (or ViP722/ViP922 DVRs, for that matter).

Most people will run into this problem, when upgrading to a Hopper 3, from their prior-gen Hopper. Since it’s basically free for many/most people to upgrade to Hopper 3 – and you get a ton of new stuff – this is happening a lot these days.

The specific issue is that streaming fails, and the DVR content doesn’t display properly, when connecting to DISH Anywhere. The web site loads properly, but the DVR tab doesn’t display the right content. It may also fail to stream live TV channels.

The Fix

The fix is pretty simple. You just need to completely uninstall DISH Anywhere, by running the uninstall app. Then, reinstall DISH Anywhere on your computer, and it will magically start working again.

Why is this necessary? I think that the background handler app for DISH Anywhere pairs itself to the Receiver ID of the original DISH Network receiver that you log in with. For some reason, and this is definitely a bug, not a feature… it won’t let go. Even when your Receiver ID on the web site updates, the handler app in the background appears to keep trying to hail the old DISH Hopper or DVR.

This also explains why the Android and iOS versions are not impacted by this problem, because they don’t use the oddball background-app handler process.

Hope that helps people. I’m surprised DISH hasn’t posted a support article… but they’re free to link to mine at any time.