It was just about a year ago when we were ramping up to introduce Tablo to the world. At that point, we figured that most users would watch Tablo content on tablets and on TVs via Roku or Apple TV... (And eventually this thing called Chromecast that was brand spankin' new...) We also put together a web app to be used on computers.
We never really thought people would be using their smartphone to watch Tablo content regularly and figured the web app would work quite well for smartphone users that wanted to catch a quick clip or schedule something on the go.
Here we are a year later and while we were right about the numbers of folks watching Tablo via Roku and tablets, we admit that we misjudged the amount of people who would be interested in watching TV on their phones.
While our engineering resources are pretty tied up making improvements to the primary way that our users access Tablo recordings - the Roku - as well as working to add to and improve the experience for other 'living room' type scenarios, we wanted to do something for those of you patiently waiting for native smartphone apps.
While we wait for resources to become available to create native apps for smaller screens, we have taken the initiative to morph our web app into something that will be downloadable from app stores and will play nicely with smartphones.
You can read more about it here and we'll let you know when they're available.
@lowbee - While these apps are still based on HTML, they will behave much more like a native smartphone app and will be available for download from the app stores.
Will this support AirPlay on iOS … and the whole sync thing is very painful if you only seldom watch on your phone … Honestly when the app launches it should allow you to play a video and in the background do a sync … …or better yet just display only the required information needed to render the current screen on the phone and just store the rest of the data on the tablo itself… and eschew syncing completely (think thin-client).
@Ericgus@TabloSupport yes and no – it’s still thick-client. There is work going on though to support thin-clients, but this round of phone apps has the same behavior as the other apps in that there’s an initial sync process.
Woo Hoo! Will this have the same functionality as the Tablet App? The reason I ask is that for some reason I can access Tablo from my Nexus 7 on my LAN but not my Note II but when on WAN Tablo Connect works perfectly on the Note II. Will this allow Note II access like Nexus 7 on LAN?
@Artemus - We haven’t done testing on a wide variety of phones yet so I can’t say for sure how it will work for you. However, it will have the same functionality as the web app.
