Cutting the cord soon. Opinions on setup?

Yes. And I could add it on uverse too. Not worth the money. If I’m going to spend money on a premium channel it will be HBO or Showtime.

You’ve received some good advice here, so all I’d add as a 2 month old cord cutter with Tablo is to 1) Ensure you have the Tablo hard wired to your router and 2) be willing to adjust your wi-fi router placement if you’re like me and hadn’t done a good job of optimizing pre-cord-cut (or, if you have a bigger house, could also include installing one of ethernet powerline adapters, moca adapters, wif-fi extender). I originally had some buffering issues on a few of my upstairs TVs, but spent some time with finding a more central spot for the router (same TP Link Archer C7 @lkahhan mentions and has had rave reviews from this community) and eventually settled on a setup that has all 4 TVs streaming Tablo without issue.

I think what’s often overlooked, aside from the cash you’ll save, is the empowering sense of independence you’ll feel from having total control of your programming. It feels great to shed the shackles of cable.

And if you can wait, I’d hold out for the Roku 4. If you need more Rokus to feed all of your TVs some nice options are:

  • Prepay up for 3 months of Sling TV and get a free Roku Streaming Stick (Sling TV is a little buggy, but gets you access to Watch ESPN, which I find pretty reliable)
  • Roku 2’s 2015 model has same processor as Roku 3, and can be had for $70 now, and perhaps less with launch of 4.

You’re right. There’s been a lot of good information. Thanks everyone!

I do have a really spread out house. It’s about 150 ft. long and about 45 ft wide. The tech center is in the workshop at one end and the bedrooms are all at the other end with the living room and family room in the middle. I’ve run ethernet the length of the house with 3 switches along the way as branch points. Each one of those has a WiFi access point and some spare gigabit ports. The internet connection is 25Mbit fiber.

The Tablo is hard wired in the upstairs bedroom to get a good OTA signal. Antenna signal isn’t a problem. I live 12 miles from the towers. Now that it’s up and running, it seems to be doing fine. I just upgraded to 2.2.2 so we’ll see if that changes anything significant. Before the upgrade it wasn’t detecting the hard drive, and now it is. So that’s a good start.

I am just going on the info provided to Cordkillers

“And an Amazon rep told David in email “… we’ll expand Amazon Video to the upcoming Apple TV 4th Gen in the near future.”

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Just ordered a Roku 3. I didn’t see anything I really needed on the 4.

I’m planning to compare the Roku to the FireTV Stick I already have as far as performance, interface, ease of use, and features. Whichever one comes out ahead, that’s what I’ll buy for the other 2 TVs. We have an XBox 360 and Playstation 3 on the other TVs, but I want things set up so the US is the same no matter which TV you’re using.

So far the Tablo is doing fine. I like that the “TV Shows” screen brings in all of the shows that appear on the guide in one alphabetized screen where you can pick and choose what to record. Given the number of shows I’ve already chosen, I’m thinking maybe I should have gotten the 4 tuner model. :smile:

Just throwing in 2cents to piss everyone off and make life more complex, but.

I have a Roku3 and although I am very happy with it there are some limitations in choosing it for your front end. (I don’t have a Tabloo so someone needs to correct this a little) The Roku has no volume control, not that big a deal but slightly annoying. The Roku also only supports MKV containers and MP4 (I think, sometimes it will play avi but takes minutes to load) I know this doesn’t affect Tablo but if you are cutting the cord, odds are you are going to be using DLNA devices, so Plex is transcoding or you are hoping the formats are correct. On the Roku remote it doesn’t have a channel button so you can’t use it to change channels (Do any of them?) Can’t turn wireless off (Who cares) well its wireless seems to smash all the neighboring networks and can cause your wireless to perform less than optimal. There are actually lots of people that open up Roku’s and break the WiFi antenna’s off. Those may sound like big issues but they really aren’t much, tho annoying, I really like the Roku. One thing tho, you hear about the Roku having thousands of channels, about 60% are church’s. Fyi

Kinda funny is the other features most requested are ones that the Tablo handles.

The Roku 4 will have wireless AC, so if you have a wireless AC router and plan to connect to the Roku wireless, the Roku 4 has faster wireless.

I’m planning on upgrading to the Roku 4 for the living room, BUT keep the Roku 3 and move it to the bedroom to replace the Roku LT 2700x - it’s near the end of its life, some things don’t work on it, it only has 2.4 Ghz WiFi. Watching recordings I get the Waiting, Please wait error. I don’t get that on the Roku 3. Both are wireless, only the Roku 3 is on 5 Ghz WiFi.

I took a long time to finally cut the cord because I didn’t want to deal with the uncertainty of steaming to multiple devices over WIFI. It took an entire day, and parts of others, but I finally ran wired network to all rooms where we have a TV, and bought a few antennas. Problem is, the antennas worked great in the upstairs bedrooms but not in the first floor living room or family room. I’m glad I discovered Tablo, I connected it to one of the upstairs antennas and have not looked back. We typically still use the antennas in the bedrooms and only use Tablo upstairs when watching something recorded. But for the first floor where of course we have the best and biggest TVs Tablo is working great. Each TV has a Roku 3.

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So I started this venture with the FireTV Stick.

  • The interface is decent
  • It has good speed
  • It has all the apps I want
  • It talks to the Tablo just fine
  • The Tablo app has a decent layout

I just received the Roku 3 and unboxed it yesterday.

  • The interface is ok
  • It has all the apps I want
  • It talks to the Tablo just fine
  • The Tablo app for Roku SUCKS. Rather than having full access to the 7 or 14 (whichever it is) days of guide data, you can see only the shows that are currently on. This is ridiculous. The rest of the interface itself is mediocre.

The Roku is hardwired, but actually was more glitchy watching recordings from the Tablo. I was watching The Simpsons last night on the Roku and getting lines of digital distortion. It even froze the picture a couple of times while the sound continued. A tap of the pause/play button and it synced up again, but still had the distortion lines every 10 seconds or so. In fairness I should mention that I have the Tablo set to stream 1080p. I did notice that there is a 1080p Roku/Chromecast option, so I’ll give that a try and see if there is improvement.

I switched to the FireTV Stick and started The Simpsons where I left off. After one little hiccup when it started, the stream was flawless. (The FireTV Stick is WiFi only)

So for the moment at least, I’m leaning towards FireTV for the rest of the house.

@TabloTV - While I know the app has to run on different platforms, and this might not be completely possible, I would make an effort to make the Tablo app across all platforms consistent. Since the Roku app just recently came out I can only guess that it was thrown together in haste to not miss out on that market share. I’m hoping there are plans to bring it’s interface up to the level that it is on FireTV. That interface looks much more like the familiar cable TV listings along with all of it’s features. The blocky menu and single timeframe listing for the Roku just isn’t appealing to me.

Try the Tablo preview app for the Roku if you haven’t yet, it’s a much better interface.

https://www.tablotv.com/tablo-products/#tablo-apps

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Yes try the Tablo Preview channel which is a private channel you must add manually, it’s not available in the Channel Store on the Roku.

Read this for more info:
https://www.tablotv.com/blog/now-available-updated-roku-channel-and-apps-firetv/

@matt, your link was the one I needed. It had the channel code in it. “tablopreview” Giving it a shot now.

KSum I have to laugh a little, maybe its getting used to the device because I started with a Roku3 first then got a Fire Stick (It was on sale and its so damn cheap) but I found the interface frustrating, had video hiccups with the wireless router maybe 2 feet away. (When it comes to apps you have to have a Plex Pass to use Plex, No ability to use DNLA servers) Also because I have become a Plex junkie (FYI TabloRipper will convert to mp4 or a format that works with Plex…so awesome) When it comes to the Roku, go on reddit and there is a channel dedicated to Plex shares, you can access someones plex server and odds are you can get any movie (Im talking ones that are screener copies for oscar viewing) and also TV series, also NewsOn has all the local news channels for somewhat big cities. I haven’t done it yet but you can sideload Kodi on the Firestick and thats supposed to be a awesome program. (Since I haven’t used it all I can say is that others think its great) Glad to here your having good experiences with Amazon Fire, but its not been nice to me and Roku has rocked.

I have the same Motorola router from my Time Warner cable days. Working fine with Tablo. I kept TW Internet 3.5 mbps service at $14.99/mo.

Yeah, I didn’t like the FireTV interface either. Plex has been relegated to just serving up my movies and home movies so it’s fine. I just wish it didn’t cost money for the Plex pass but given the advantages over DLNA I think I can deal with it.

The Roku has become more stable lately. I haven’t checked to see if there was another firmware update, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed that has helped immensely is getting off of WiFi. Ever since my days as an outdoor wireless ISP I have never been able to find a decent WiFi system that actually freakin’ works as advertised. I’ve had 10 different brands over the years and there’s always one Access Point in the house that needs to be rebooted about once a month. If there’s someone connected to the same AP watching a 720p YouTube video, watching anything but Netflix starts to buffer. We’re talking 802.11n connected to a gigabit network here and there’s freakin’ buffering. WiFi has always been the culprit with things like this.

I’ve hard wired everything that can be throughout the house and haven’t had any real problems, so I guess I’m all set. We’re settling in to the routine of finding something to watch, and binge watching series we never saw before. I’m hooked on Homeland at the moment and we started watching Billions. Vikings and of course Game of Thrones will be on the schedule soon. :smile:

Ever since I hardwired everything I haven’t touched the Fire Stick, so I think I’m happy with Roku now.

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Upgrade your internet speed.

It’s currently 25/25 mbit fiber.

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My speed is only 3.5 using NP so I don’t think that’s your problem.