Amazon FireTV - User Experience

I just purchased tablo a few days ago and I am a bit disappointed with the UI performance on a Fire TV (Box not Stick) . It is just plain pokey for a device that hosts a 1.7 GHz quad-core CPU with 2 GB of RAM-- the user experience if far better on my old ipad mini

I have forced close all apps and still very laggy even in the simple ilive TV mode just moving down the channels… Art is slow to display and I can easy get ahead of the software in keystrokes

Is my experience unique?

Your experience mirrors mine - and like you, I thought with the specs for the Fire TV box, it would be a very fast UI, but in fact, the old Roku 3 is smoother and faster in real world use.
I also have the Fire TV stick if you want to try something REALLY slow someday.
I have to believe Tablo has a lot of optimizing left to do with the Tablo app for Fire TV - because both the UI lags and the video player isn’t smooth (compare playback to actual live TV or the Roku and you’ll see what I mean).
So far, very disappointed in Fire TV - but at least it doesn’t reboot itself in the middle of watching a recording as does the Roku of late.

Thanks Chris for the confirmation … I guess there is hope since the Roku is smooth

Same performance here. I am using the Fire TV box (not stick), with a wired ethernet connection. Guide loading is slow, stream startup is slow. I have suffered along since the beginning of the year (2015) and was hoping the fixes along the way would improve the performance and compared to the beginning of the year it is better but still painfully slow. Compared to other apps like netflix, hulu, etc… that are streaming across the internet, Tablo is way slower and you would think streaming on an internal network would fly…

I agree with the performance issues with Fire TV and especially Fire Stick. Same room, Apple application works fine, Fire Stick unusable. Fire Stick works fine with Amazon Prime, Netflix, and the like. Fire TV With Ethernet over Power usable but intermittent buffering. Digital local broadcasting from cable still looks better. I know I might need to upgrade my antenna on this. Replay of recordings seem to perform better.

I agree that optimization is needed on this. I understand that the application had a major rewrite this past summer.

I am a very new user, and do what I can to make this work.

Love my Tablo on Fire TV. Smooth, clear, and quick.

A Fire TV is a great device for viewing everything except Tablo content. The Tablo app needs a lot of work/optimization as it is slower than my Grandma on a cold winter day.

Are you using the Fire TV Stick or the Fire TV box? The Tablo app works great on the Fire TV box which I have hard wired. If the box, is your box hard wired or connect via WiFi?

Fire TV box. I have a couple of sticks as well but they are useless.

The have both the 2014 and 2015 versions of the Fire TV’s and see the same slowness issues with the Tablo app across all of them. The main problem is the slowness in scrolling the Live TV guide. It is always slower than on a Roku and at times will freeze for a few seconds once you try to scroll down past the initial channels that are listed on the guide. I have noticed it is also far slower in loading the thumbnails at the top of the screen when scrolling the guide. More often than not you can scroll down 4 of 5 channels and it will still be showing the thumbnail for the initial channel you are on and then slowly catch up to the channel you have scrolled down/up to. It’s aggravating.

I have a couple of wired Roku 3s and a couple of wired Fire TVs (gen1).

Since the latest Roku firmware upgrade they both seem to be about the same performance with Tablo TV. I also have a couple of Fire stick devices that are useless probably because my AT&T wifi/router is only 2.4 Ghz.

My theory about poor performance with the Fire OS (android) is that the memory/cache/storage doesn’t like too many apps stored on the device before it starts swapping increasing iowaits.

Tom

I was curious about that as well. After receiving another Gen2 Fire TV recently I set it up and loaded the Tablo app before putting anything else on it. I found that the slowness issues with the Tablo app are still there.

In every other app I use the responsiveness of the Fire TV is excellent.

I’m a new user, and I just started using my Tablo and Fire TV yesterday… One thing I have noticed is that the Fire TV response improves greatly if you are able to reduce the number of channels you have in your live-tv list. I started with about 43 channels, and the Fire TV interface was unstable and bordering on unusable. I literally dozed off while waiting for some button responses. After pruning out many stations that I will probably never watch, I’m down to a list of 21 stations, and now the performance is much better. Ten stations would probably be even better… It’s still “bad” and “slow”, but at least it’s modestly responsive and doesn’t hang-up for 30 to 90 seconds at a time.

Does anyone have a clue about how to step forward in a recording playback on the Fire TV without having the playback pause every time you press the button? I know previews are supposed to be coming, but if it hit the ground running that would be a big help.

Thanks All…
— John B.

Unfortunately no, after you FF you have to hit play.

Thanks @theuser86… Hopefully the @Tablo folks have an update coming for Fire TV users soon…

+1 for tablo adding the feature to not have press play after ff/rwding. It’s really annoying.