New York Dish Network customer of 24 years cancels his service. Then he keeps the box—and finds the ultimate workaround for keeping all of his movies and shows

A Batavia, New York, Dish Network customer of 24 years canceled his service and believes he found a way to circumvent the company's protocols to allow him to keep all of the movies and TV shows he paid for without continuing to fork over the cash for a monthly subscription.

Bert (@bert7382) posted a TikTok where he shares the discovery, but folks debated whether his plan would actually work.

"We were a Dish Network customer in excess of 24 years. We recently canceled our service with Dish Network," he says, flipping down the receiver box's front cover and extricating a data card from it to show off to the camera.

Next, he slides the Dish Network card back into the box as he continues with his tale. "And then the individual that we completed this transaction with, said you can keep all of the hardware. We have no need for it, it's of age," they told the longtime customer.

Bert continued, "Now, needless remind you, no one ever called us to update. One of the things we decided to get rid of was, we just got a package we're never watching. So why pay for something we're never gonna watch? We got internet services, and we have all these streaming channels, so let's just not, so we decided to get rid of it," he explains.

After sharing his reason for getting rid of his Dish Network TV service, he highlighted that preferences for other streaming services prompted him to finally cut the cord, as he had stopped watching Dish for quite some time.

While he hasn't been doing a whole lot of TV watching as of late on Dish Network, that wasn't always the case. Bert says he's accumulated quite the library of saved content on his box. "Here's the thing: We've got, oh my Lord, years of movies that we have purchased and rented in Dish Network," he explains.

The next point Bert brings up is one that physical media proponents will happily bring up to extol the benefits of having hard copies of a film, TV series, video game, etc. in one's hand. And it's that service providers, production companies, networks, and the like can revoke one's access to a piece of content that a person owns at any time.

This fear is one that is rooted in reality. In 2022, StudioCanal removed some 500 movies from the Sony Playstation Store. This affected users who bought these movies outright, due to the expiry of licensing contracts Sony Interactive Entertainment had with StudioCanal.

In 2019, Microsoft shut down the eBook section of its online store, deleting the libraries of folks who used the service. The Redmond-based tech giant issued full refunds to its customers and gave $25 Microsoft Store credits to those who had used the service's margin notes functionality.

Sometimes, mergers can affect digital content as well. After Sony packaged Funimation into Crunchyroll, the latter service had its app shut down. While Funimation users were able to get their recurring subscriptions transferred over to Crunchyroll, any digital copies redeemed from the purchase of Blu-ray discs and DVDs weren't going to be included as part of the merger.

If you watched the Liam Neeson "Naked Gun" reboot and cracked up at how much he loves his TIVO, then you'll appreciate Bert's perseverance in ensuring he won't lose two decades' worth of content that he paid for.

Initially, however, he was informed by a representative from the TV service provider that all of this content was going to go away. Just like folks who purchased Discovery TV shows on the Sony PlayStation Store experienced back in 2023.

"And then the associate that we were working with on the phone said, 'You're gonna lose everything, everything that you bought is gone. You'll never see it again.' And I'm like, 'Well, that's unfortunate cause we did buy them and we do own them. We should have access to them,'" Bert said.

"He goes well when you get rid of our subscription you get rid of the access to the movies that you purchased. Which is kind of like the same s**t that Netflix does and Amazon does, and all these other companies and s**t," Bert tells his viewers.

"Vudu's the only company cause there's no subscription service for Vudu," he says, referencing the service which was rebranded as Fandango at Home. "I said, 'Hey, OK you know what? We're just not gonna pay this anymore. We're done. We'll get rid of everything, knowing, full well, that those things, those purchases, that digital media, the movies, are stored somewhere," he added.

Next, Bert explained his determination to locate precisely where these movies were located. He said that more often than not, they're placed in a data center. But that's not what's going on with his Dish Network box, he says. "In this case, buying something a long time ago is leasing it and not having to return it; even if I did have to return it, I'm doing this anyway," Bert remarks.

He then films himself opening up the Dish Network box the associate told him he could keep and begins showing off exactly where the movies are stored. "You know if you look a little deeper you can figure out where s**t is stored. Right there's a hard drive," he says, pointing to the large storage bay placed inside of his Dish Network box.

"And that hard drive is where all my movies are. And if you go out and buy yourself a hard drive reader that plugs directly into your PC or USB port in your Smart TV, guess what you have access to? All the movies that we purchased for the last 15 years through Dish Network," he says triumphantly.

Toward the end of his clip, Bert explains what he's going to do next with the hard drive. "I'm gonna give this guy a tug, go boot it up and watch some of the movies cause my wife was just asking, 'Remember that movie?' I'm like, 'Yeah, it was on Dish Network.' She was like, 'Oh man.' I'm gonna get lucky tonight cause I just found the movies!" he says, cackling as the video comes to a close.

Folks who replied to his clip stated that accessing the films probably isn't as simple as plugging the hard drive into another device. Namely due to the access protocols Dish Network uses for folks to play these movie files through its custom system.

"Even if they are on a hard drive, I bet you they are in a proprietary stored format not playable," one said. Others argued as to whether the films were actually saved on the hard drive, or rather data files that allow customers to access the films, which are stored elsewhere on Dish Network servers.

Some said they had a similar receiver that actually saves local files of films to it. But there were those who insisted this wasn't the case.

While Bert's model is a Hopper, which does allow Dish Network customers to locally store programs, accessing the files might prove difficult or impossible.

Dish does allow customers to use external hard drives to save movies, but the company says the drive must be especially formatted by Dish in order to do so. So someone would need access to these tools to figure out how to de-encrypt the files and watch their movies.

However, his best bet to save his movies was probably keeping his Dish Network subscription active and then using a DVR tool to manually record all of the films he bought.