The comments came during a Thursday call on Ergen and other Dish executives took questions about the company’s latest earnings results, which fell short of analysts’ expectations.

While most of the call was dedicated to Dish’s high stakes bid for Sprint, which would give it the chance to offer mobile-broadband-TV packages, analysts also asked Ergen about his company’s ongoing spat with broadcasters. In recent months, Dish has incensed the networks by selling “the Hopper,” a popular product to skip commercials, and touched off rumors that it might buy Aereo, which allows viewers to watch TV on their phones for $8 a month.

On today’s call, however, Ergen sounded more conciliatory.

“We admire what [Aereo is] doing. We indirectly get a benefit as it puts downward pressure on retransmission consent fees.. But all things being equal, we’d prefer to work with the broadcasters,” he said. The broadcasters are equipped to do something themselves. We’re more likely to work with existing partners.”

The rhetoric is part of a complicated dance between pay TV providers, including Dish, and content owners over the spiraling cost of programming; in this struggle, services like the Hopper and Aereo have become a source of leverage for Dish.

On the call, Ergen repeated his call for smaller cable “bundles” and more a la carte offerings.

“At the end of the day, if the bundle price gets too high, [consumers] will find other ways to do it — they’ll use small antennas, they’ll steal programming.”

Ergen added that he believes the traditional dual stream model for TV, consisting of subscription and advertising revenue, will continue thanks to new mobile opportunities. In particular, he said that mobile viewing opened the prospect of valuable local-based ad targeting that will result in tailored ads being delivered to the living room, tablets and smartphones.

He added that some “forward looking broadcasters” were already on board in exploring new bundle opportunities with Dish.

“I’ve never met a programmer or broadcaster that was against making more money.”

The Hopper DVR lets users record television and then instantly fast-forward past all the commercials. Today, Dish put out a new ad (yes, there’s some irony here) that offered an “in memorium” for TV commercials — the concept is that sitting through commercials is something people did in the past but no more.

The Hopper’s ability to skip ads is the subject of a heated legal dispute between Dish and broadcasters. So far, courts have refused to issue a preliminary injunction to shut down the service for copyright reasons. ”The lawsuits going on today will ultimately decide the fate of commercials. Be careful what you wish for. If broadcsaters win, they’ll outlaw the DVR,” warned Ergen at the event. He says the service is legal under the law because it doesn’t erase the commercials, but simply lets consumers skip past them.

Some people in the Industry have suggested the fight over the Hopper is really a way for Dish to pressure broadcasters to lower retransmission fees — the money they charge Dish for the right to broadcast their over-the-air shows. While Ergen denied the Hopper is a leverage device, event host Peter Kafka pressed him on why the Hopper only fast-forwards past broadcast shows and not cable ones. Ergen claims this is due to technology limitations related to the way shows are streamed.

CNET was ready to give the Hopper with Sling DVR, a set-top box from Dish Network, a spot in the finals of its “Best in CES” awards at the Consumer Electronics Show — until a directive came through from the site’s corporate parent CBS that the Hopper couldn’t win the award, because CBS is suing the company over its AutoHop commercial-skipping feature.

Not only was the Hopper disqualified from the award, but CNET added an editor’s note to its review of the device saying it would no longer be reviewing any products that were the subject of litigation with its parent company — a list that would include both the Hopper and Aereo, the over-the-net video broadcasting startup backed by Barry Diller, which CBS is also suing.

As John Hermann of BuzzFeed noted, this is probably every tech journalist’s nightmare: being told by a corporate parent that they can’t do their jobs because the parent co. is involved in a a lawsuit. But it’s more than just a journalist’s nightmare — it could be a serious problem for CNET when it comes to maintaining the trust of their readers. The site noted that the restrictions only affects its reviews and not its news reporting, but will readers make that distinction?

Presumably, when someone goes to the CNET site looking for information about set-top boxes or video-streaming hardware, they want the most complete information they can find. If they know that certain products aren’t going to be reviewed because CBS doesn’t like them for some reason, that’s going to color their impressions of the site’s thoroughness in doing its reviews — and it might also make them wonder about what else is being left out.

The more cynical might wonder whether anyone will even notice once the CES decision blows over, but for media entities — even large ones — in times like these, the trust of their readers is more valuable than ever, and it should probably not be squandered lightly.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hans Gerwitz

This could be crucial in the satellite’s legal battle with broadcasters over these features, given that subscribers now have more control of how they’re used.

With the new upgrade, Dish’s Hopper DVRs are no longer set by default to record every prime-time show on each of the Big Four networks — i.e. ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. The user now has to select which networks they want recorded.

Dish subscribers have to switch a default setting from “no” to “yes” if they want commercials deleted from those recordings — that setting had previously been defaulted to the “on” mode.

Dish’s Ergen: AutoHop protecting TV from internet video barberism

Subscribers are also now in charge of when programs are deleted, as opposed to the Hopper setting a default date.

The tweaks, which began rolling out from Dish last week, were originally reported Thursday by Variety. Dish later confirmed them with us. The tweaks are just beginning to be discussed by Dish subscribers in various satellite and cable TV forums.

A Dish spokesman told us the upgrade was something the company does “routinely” to its products and that it was meant to “enhance the user experience.” Of course, this reeks more of legal positioning.

Dish is currently battling CBS, Fox and NBC in court, with the networks asserting that the so-called “Auto Hop” commercial-skipping feature violates Dish’s affiliate agreement to carry those networks’ channels.

Also read: Dish defends ad-skipping DVR – peers throw it under the bus

Dish has been seeking to exploit legal precedent established in 2008 by Cablevision, which won a New York appellate court ruling against broadcasters who were suing the cable company over its virtual DVR service. Key to that ruling: subscribers had ample control of the technology, not Cablevision.

Dish has already lost one key early round. It actually filed suit first to have the case heard in New York, but the Big Apple court ruled that it would be decided in California, where the broadcasters had subsequently filed to have their claims heard.

On Friday, NBCUniversal and CBS Corp. filed separate federal lawsuits against Dish Network. They joined Fox, which filed its own suit against the satellite TV service provider Thursday, in claiming Dish’s new “AutoHop” digital video recorder feature infringes on their copyrights by deleting their commercials.

Also read: Dish’s “Auto Hop” ad-skipping device in legal showdown with networks

However, with broadcasters loudly signaling their unease with Dish’s new product offering over past few weeks, and litigation widely viewed as a foregone conclusion, perhaps the more interesting development Friday was the public response issued by David Shull, senior VP of programming for Englewood, Co.-based Dish.

Noting that Dish had actually sued the Big Four broadcast networks first, Shull labeled broadcasters’ legal challenges as “absurd and profoundly anti-consumer.”

With networks charging pay TV operators like Dish — and by extension, its subscribers — millions of dollars to re-transmit their signals, Shull noted, “customers deserve to use content they pay for as they wish.”

Shull also said that AutoHop needs to be “put in perspective” — most of Dish’s viewers watch shows either live or the same night they’re recorded, he explained, and the feature only extends to recordings viewed the day after broadcast and must be enabled by the customer in order to work.

And besides, he added, “Customers have been skipping commercials since the birth of the remote control.”

It is here where Dish seems to have a lot of outside support.

Noting that consumers have been trained for over a decade to avoid advertising, noted media technology analyst Richard Greenfield on Friday posted a blog calling for media companies to “innovate, not litigate.”

As Greenfield noted, most DVRs leased to consumers by pay TV providers already have robust commercial-skipping capabilities.

Fair use advocate Public Knowledge also weighed in, with organization president and CEO Gigi B. Sohn arguing in a statement, “Consumers have the right to control their TV watching, using whatever technology is available to them.”

On Tuesday, Glenn Britt, chairman and CEO of the No. 4 pay TV service provider in the U.S., Time Warner Cable, became the first executive from the multi-channel industry to speak out about a controversial new feature in Dish’s Hopper digital video recorders. This feature filters out commercials from the recordings of broadcast-network shows.

“The dual stream of advertising and subscription fees has been great for content providers, and we don’t want to destroy one of those revenue streams,”Britt told a Cable Show audience, which included reporters from publications including Ad Age. “Subscription prices will go up or less content will be made.”

Also read: How broadcasters could have stopped Dish’s Hopper

Mark Greatrex, chief marketing officer for another top cable operator, Cox Communications, also weighed in: “As a marketer it’s not particularly helpful to bring that much uncertaintly into the marketplace.”

During upfront presentations to advertisers last week, virtually every broadcast network chief took verbal aim at the feature, with Fox and NBC even pledging not to let Dish run ads for it on their channels.

But speaking to Associated Press Tuesday, Vivek Khemka, Dish Network VP of product management for Dish, said they’ve got it all wrong.

By recording every minute broadcasted in prime time by ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, the Hopper is actually enabling consumers to watch more television. “It’s a win-win for consumers and the networks,” he said.

Of course, it’s hard to see how the networks are “winning” when a key aspect of their monetization model has been stripped away.

The other part of that model is the relatively new revenue stream created by broadcast networks demanding retransmission fees from the cable, satellite and telco TV service providers who offer their signals to subscribers.

With Dish trying to grow its current subscriber count of around 14 million, offering consumer-friendly features that let users skip ads probably helps. But all DVRs provided by multi-channel operators feature some level of commercial-skipping ability (it’s simply called fast-forward).

Questions that remain unanswered:

By throwing a Molotov Cocktail directly at broadcasters, might Dish be looking for a negotiating hedge against the Big Four Networks to help control fast-rising retransmission costs? And if so, might Dish have expected a little support from its peers in the multi-channel business?

If the answer turns out to be “yes” to the latter, it sure hasn’t received that support yet.

If only they had gone all the way with that case …

The rumination stems from a new commercial-deleting feature called “Auto Hop” introduced last week by Dish Network for its Hopper DVRs. The feature essentially strips out commercial pods for shows recorded on the major broadcast TV networks.

Once again, broadcasters are facing a DVR function that undermines their ad-supported business model. And once again, they seem poised to litigate over it.

”I think this is an attack on our eco system,” NBC Broadcasting chairman Ted Harbert said during a Monday conference call held in conjunction with NBC’s upfront presentation to advertisers. “I’m not for it.”

Also read: Forget Mad Men, does Dish hate all advertising?

With subscriber growth for satellite TV services stagnating, Dish undoubtedly sees such a consumer-friendly feature as a way to differentiate itself and expand on its current count of 14 million U.S. customers. Neither Dish’s chief satellite competitor, DirecTV, or any rival cable or telco pay TV operator has been bold — or disrespectful enough — to undermine programmers in this way.

“Auto Hop adds to an already long list of broadcast-unfriendly features of Dish’s service, including 30 second skip buttons on their remote controls (other DVR services, including DirecTV and TiVo, have ‘locked’ this feature out of sight; Dish boldly promotes it on a button on the remote),” wrote Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett last week.

Should broadcasters seek legal remedies to stop Dish, they will have to battle a determined adversary, led by chairman Charlie Ergen, who’s no stranger to protracted, nasty media litigation.

But as the Hollywood Reporter noted, it didn’t have to be this way. In 2001, the networks sued ReplayTV parent company Sonicblue over a DVR feature that let users fast-forward through commercials with a press of a button.

Sonicblue filed for bankruptcy in 2003, before a federal court could decide the case, and the general perception was that the networks managed to sue ReplayTV out of existence. With ReplayTV vanquished, broadcasters never followed through on their quest for a ruling that commercial-skipping DVRs indeed undermine economic underpinnings of — and thus violate — copyrighted material.

In the interim, legal precedent unfavorable to broadcasters was established, such a 2009 federal appeals court ruling that Cablevision did not violate the copyrights of network shows when it offered its subscribers a remote-storage DVR.

Meanwhile, Dish promises to be a tougher adversary than Sonicblue.

Dish’s ongoing court battle with AMC Networks over defunct HD programming service Voom HD is just once example of its pugnaciousness. Earlier this month, a New York court ruled that Dish intentionally destroyed evidence in the four-year-old, $2.5 billion case, which stemmed from the satellite company’s decision to drop carriage of the AMC channels back in 2008. The court upheld AMC’s case, which now appears set for trial.

Perhaps coincidentally — perhaps not — Dish revealed last week that it doesn’t intend to renew its carriage deal for AMC’s cable networks, which expires June 30, despite the fact that ratings are up big on the AMC flagship channel.