We have a Fire TV box (original model) and a current TiVo customer. We are looking to possibly switch to Tablo for various reasons. I have read different posts here and other sites complaining about sluggishness and overall slow responsiveness when using the Tablo app on Fire TV. However most of them are older (in 2015) so i was curious how things run on this platform now w/ whatever updates may have come out since '15. I know its difficult to gauge UI performance since a lot of it is up for interpretation and tolerance but as a guide we’ve been used to the overall speed of navigating and menu changes of the Fire TV and apps such as Netflix and plex on that platform (and of course our TiVo Premiere). the 10 second delay in changing live tv channels i can handle given how that is designed but i’m mostly curious about switching from Live TV over to recordings, navigating through recordings, etc. any help or feedback would be awesome! thank you!
I don’t have the original fire TV but I can’t imagine it being any slower than the fire stick. It is pretty much as responsive as other implementations. The main area of sluggishness I found was the live guide which is slow no matter what if you have tons of TV stations on it. This mainly showed up as the text in the guide not showing up (which is sent from the tablo, not stored locally, so its the tablo being slow).
I thought the tablo was just fine over the fire stick.
I have both the 1st gen and 2nd gen fire tv boxes (Not Sticks) and Tablo works great on both. Like JeffD said the only real issue with speed is with the Live TV guide being a little slow. But, the Tablo is not meant for Live TV channel surfing.
Sometimes, the app on the fire tv does not close properly. When you exit it’ll go right back to the start up screen or live tv (if that was your last activity). When this happens, I click the “home” button on the remote and then do a force close of the app through the settings of the fire tv. I think the engineers of the tablo are trying to correct this problem, but who knows. It’s not too troublesome otherwise.
I think you’ll be pleased with the Fire TV app experience for the Tablo.
I have the 1st gen Fire TV box, and the Tablo app works just fine on it. I also have the 1st and 2nd gen Fire TV sticks, and the Tablo app works fine on both of those as well, but the 1st gen stick is under-powered and the UI is generally sluggish, but it works fine once your watching a recording. The 2nd gen Fire TV stick works great all around.
I agree… Both of our TVs have these… It’s perfect… Not sure if 1st Gen have wifi AC but 2nd does have it so it optimizes my connectivity all around…
thank you for everyones feedback here! I think what i was most concerned about was switching menu’s and navigating from w/in the menus. best comparison i can think of is the difference that we see using our hardwired gen 1 Fire TV box (really fast and responsive) compared to how sluggish our 1st gen fire tv stick is (wifi). We’d be accessing Tablo via the Fire TV Box (hardwired) so just have been on the fence if the complaints people have had would be seen in this case or if they were more isolated to app issues on roku and others. The 10 second delay like i said i can deal with if its just the initial time going to the channel and in our area we have about 20-30 channels so hopefully thats not too many to show too much of a slowdown but i could probably trim those down too if it would help.
of course now i’ve been reading about the tablo droid release coming w/ nvidia shield and waffling if that would be smarter to invest in (would be a more sizable investment though)
I have a 4k Fire TV and a 1st Gen stick, both using wifi. The stick is just slow for everything. Not so bad that the wife complains but just not as snappy as the box. And I don’t know why people say Tablo is not for live TV. It is what we use 99% of the time. We use it to pause and rewind all the time. But we are not channel surfers.
not channel surfers here either so that delay doesnt bother me at all. how is the pausing/ff/rw speed and performance on both fires? any delays there ? hard to compare tivo to that if you dont have both i know
Both respond well. Both are only using wireless N because of how far they are from the router. Like others have said, the biggest difference I see is how fast the guide loads the titles. I would say ff and rewind are faster using Tablo than Netflix. I don’t have Tivo to compare.
The original FireTV box and Tablo work well on wireless N. I believe the sluggishness was on Gen 1 FireTV stick. I still have a gen 1 FireTV and love it. Hope to get my new UI any day now. FireTV Stick 2 works well with Tablo as well.
awesome thanks for the info! i agree that from what i’ve seen of sluggishness on our gen 1 stick that we have in our kids play room i could see how any app would also drag because of it. in comparison , our gen 1 box is so much faster. Also as a side note my gen 1 box got the new UI a couple of days ago so getting familiar with it but so far its running smooth