Dish Designing 4K Joey Set Top Box

The Dish 4K Ultra-HD set-top box named the 4K Joey. Photo: Business Wire

[Via Satellite 01-06-2015] Dish Network announced the launch of its first Ultra-HD Set-Top Box (STB). Named the 4K Joey, the unit is designed to easily integrate with Dish’s Hopper Whole Home HD Digital Video Recorder (DVR) system.

The Dish 4K Joey is dedicated hardware for Ultra-HD that will be compatible with all HDMI 2.0/ HDCP 2.2-compliant televisions and supports playback at 60fps in 10-bit color. The 4K Joey will not only play back Ultra-HD content, it will also enhance everyday viewing of television and sports programming by supporting side-by-side display of two programs, each in HD, according to Dish.

The new STB is equipped with a Broadcom dual-core chipset and Broadcom 7448 dual-core ARM processor. It features picture-in-picture, Bluetooth and supports Hopper apps such as Vevo, Netflix and Game Finder. Dish will deliver 4K content from several providers. Specific announcements will be made closer to the consumer launch of 4K Joey, which is slated for the second quarter of 2015.