I recently had to replace my phone while away from home (snowbirds) and now cannot connect to my Tablo. Would be nice to just be able to put the serial number in and get to the device remotely.
Tablo absolutely REQUIRES you to be on LAN to establish the connection with a new device. However; that does not require you to be at home on LAN physically. You can also connect via VPN if you have one established on your network, likely on your router. I realize you likely don’t have a VPN on your network or you wouldn’t be posting here with this issue. You would create a VPN certificate and then save it where you can put it on a different device (aka - your new phone). Once the certificate is there and ready to go you VPN into your LAN and Tablo will see you on LAN, thus connecting is simple!!
NO WAY around LAN requirement. Been covered hundreds of times here.
ps - if you have family members that would be willing to go to your house and setup the VPN on your router they could email you the needed certificate and then you could easily use it. Just .02
VPN definitely worked for activating my iPads and iPhone remotely but I couldn’t get it to work to activate my Apple TV. With my iPhone I would VPN into my home network and the app found my Tablo and activated. But when I connected the ATV to my iPhone hotspot, which was VPN into my home network, the ATV couldn’t find the Tablo. Is there a trick I’m missing?
I suspect that you are NOT on your home LAN when you enable hotspot. Assuming you are not rooted - most phones (I have very little experience with IPhone - android geek here) will put you back on the cell provider’s IP while on hotspot. I would configure your connection as you described above and then run an IP check while on mobile hotspot. My money is you are on the carrier’s IP and not your LAN IP at that point. Let us know.
Yep, you’re correct. Thanks for that. Not sure why I VPN in on cell data connection but not when using through the hotspot. Any suggestions for a workaround?
You would have to install the VPN on your Apple TV. I will paste in a link as an example of how to do it. Admittedly, as I told you above I am not an Apple user. I know folks that have done this but I have no interest in learning how to do it since I won’t use Apple. Why? I like root and control on a device I own. That is my issue, LOL!! You can use the vpn certificate from your working phone since its mated to the router algo already.
You may also be able to setup a VPN on a Firestick (I use this method all the time), which is then inserted into the AppleTV. Tablo will likely see it as LAN and that might work too.
Remember you will NOT have to stay on the VPN after the device has remote connection enabled. You likely will lose alot of speed while on the VPN. But, you just have to briefly connect via VPN to activate remote connect.
Perfect. Thank you. I’ve been messing with it all afternoon based on what you first pointed out. What finally I did was load OpenVPN on a win10 laptop, turned on mobile hotspot and connected the ATV via wifi. Then I figured out how to feed the wifi hot spot through the VPN and it worked. I was just coming back to let you know. 
But I’d rather have a VPN on the ATV to simplify things if I loose activation again so I’ll dig into that next. Thanks again for helping me find the path. 
We all try to help out around here. Thanks for coming back and giving me an “attaboy”. LOL!