Feature Request - Alarm / Auto-Start Morning News

Feature Requests
1

Okay imagine this, how awesome would it be if Tablo could be my alarm and auto-start the news and weather at 6 in the morning when I need to wake up and get ready.


While this feature would obviously be used primarily as an alarm clock, it could also just be a handy way to immediately start a show you were going to watch anyway.

An additional feature would be the ability to record a program at say 5:00 am and have it play at 7:30 am, if that’s when I wanted to wake up instead.


2

The problem with that idea is that the Tablo is just a media server.  If just records and tunes to shows.  To have your idea work, you need to figure out a way to get you tablet, phone, or PC to turn on at a particular time, start the Tablo app, and then select the station you want to play.  


It might be doable on a PC with the right batch software, but the Tablo folks would have nothing to do with its development.
3

@pngwolffman - It would be kind of cool but @snowcat is right… This is a lot of integration and is the type of thing that hardcore home theater buffs use home automation software for from guys like Control4, Crestron and RTI.

4

You can buy TVs that do that now. Set the station, the turn-on time, volume and it wakes you up to the 5am news on your favorite station. 

If I recall my DVD recorder would do that.

 A PC with Windows connected to a TV as the monitor can do that now, too. Scheduled task, launch WMP with this file loaded, start at whatever time, repeat whatever days and so on. 
5

You could say the same thing about Pandora, and yet it has an alarm function. It starts itself up and starts playing music when I want it to. I believe that it’s much more doable than you think.

1 Like
6

I think the issue isn’t so much about having all of the items happen in order - it’s just a matter of having the Tablo app already tuned and rolling with the AM news. That way you launch the app and the tune is tuned and rolling output. I’m using a FireTV and go to sleep with the Tonight Show - the programming hangs at some point in time during the night and when I come back in I have to exit out of the programming output, to the menu system, let it refresh and then re-enter into the morning programming. Having these steps done already shouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish and shouldn’t have any bearing on the media system supporting the Tablo output.