I think it is possible to stream a live channel.
see Tablo and VLC Player
Criaig Royce states:
That URL stays valid for that channel (in my case ABC 2.1) day in and day out whether the browser is running or not. It appears that Tablo’s video stream addresses transcend specific browser instances. So I can make in VLC a table of streams named after the channels (a playlist) and use VLC as my Tablo client without even opening a browser.
(end quote)
So I played around a bit today. I opened LiveTV and went to channel 2-3.
While it was playing, I righted clicked on Inpect Element to bring up the window console.
From the lefthand panel, I copy-pasted all the text for “video id” into a text file. (video-id text was already hightlighted for some reason.). From that text I was able to extract what looked like an URL relataed to the IP address of my Tablo. I entered that URL into VLC and it played perfectly.
Then I waited until 12noon when the channel’s program ended to make sure that I had a streaming channel URL not a program URL. The URL continued to stream.
I then closed out VLC and reopened it. I rentered the URL and it still streamed that station.