Dish Network's Hopper Cuts Ads and Causes Tremors at TV Upfronts Broadcast television executives came to New York this week, as they do every year, to talk up their new TV shows in front of advertisers. Instead, they're having to talk about yet another technology trying to tear them down. The disruptive technology at hand is an ad-eraser, embedded in new digital video recorders sold by Charles W. Ergen's Dish Network, one of the nation's top distributors of TV programming. Turn it on, and all the ads recorded on most prime-time network shows are automatically skipped, no channel-flipping or fast-forwarding necessary. Some reviewers have already called the feature, called the Auto Hop, a dream come true for consumers. But for broadcasters and advertisers, it is an attack on an entrenched television business model, and it must be strangled, lest it spread elsewhere. "How does Charlie Ergen expect me to produce "CSI" " without commercials? asked Leslie Moonves, the CBS Corporation chief executive, in response to questions from reporters on Wednesday morning covering the annual upfront presentations. Ted Harbert, the chairman of NBC Broadcasting, struck a similar note at his network's upfront presentation on Monday, calling the Dish feature an insult to the television industry. Just because technology gives you the ability to do something, does that mean you should? Not always," he said. Unlike the music and news businesses, television has been mostly successful at fending off technological challenges. Several network owners worked together to start Hulu, an online streaming Web site intended to curb piracy. This year, when a start-up called Aereo introduced a service to stream New York TV stations via the Internet, the stations banded together in filing two lawsuits to stall the service. The lawsuits are pending. But the Auto Hop is noteworthy because it originated not from a start-up but from a satellite distributor with longstanding ties to the rest of the TV industry. Dish Network regularly negotiates with the networks for the rights to rebroadcast programming. Without that programming, subscribers would switch distributors. Yet Dish has still decided to promote its ad-skipper, which comes with the Hopper, a new DVR that can record all the prime-time programming on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC simultaneously. To hear network executives tell it, Dish Network is a friend-turned-foe, once a part of the ecosystem dedicated to preserving the existing advertising model but now threatening to turn on a doomsday device. So they are closing ranks to stop it. It didn't help Dish's cause that it gave the networks less than a day's notice before announcing the feature last Thursday. At least one of the network owners, News Corporation, is no longer accepting Dish's new DVR ads on any of its properties. It and several other owners are examining whether they can sue Dish, the same way they sued a maker of DVRs a decade ago, according to several people with knowledge of the deliberations, who insisted on anonymity to speak freely about the internal discussions. Mr. Moonves, according to The Los Angeles Times, said "there are obvious things that can be done" about the ad-skipping, "and we're looking at that." James McQuivey, a vice president and analyst for Forrester Research, said that "with Dish's aggressive move to please the end customer rather than advertisers, it's clear that in the fight for TV revenue the gloves have finally come off." He continued: "The fact that Dish would be willing to anger some of its most important content partners just goes to show how desperate these times we live in really are." Desperate, because of the persistent fear that subscribers will forgo paying for television service and turn to Internet alternatives instead. A feature like Auto Hop is a dramatic step "to keep consumers interested," Mr. McQuivey asserted. The technology to automatically skip TV ads isn't new. TiVo, one of the original DVR makers, flirted with such a feature about a decade ago. Another maker, ReplayTV, actually put such a feature in place, spurring lawsuits from the major TV networks. In 2003, after the owner of ReplayTV was driven into bankruptcy, the new owners dropped the feature. A company executive was quoted as saying at the time that "we will take features out because we want to be a positive force in the industry." TiVo has taken the same approach, promoting ways to serve ads to viewers even as they're fast-forwarding through them. "We've gone from being a black hat to being more of a white hat," said Tom Rogers, the chief executive of TiVo. He was an executive at NBC a decade ago when the network was considering making an investment in TiVo. One of the conditions of the investment, he said, was that "they not have an automatic commercial skip." Through an online search, TiVo owners can find ways to hack the hardware and create an auto-skip feature, but the company has never promoted it, preferring instead to be in business with the broadcasters. Dish Network, too, is in business with the broadcasters, but it is trying to assert that the ad-eraser actually promotes them. Amy Chozick contributed reporting.