I’m a relatively new Tablo user, for only a few months. After a long career in the consumer and cable television industries, I finally cut the cord and use Tablo for my OTA channels. I spent the last 25 years of my career leading teams that built program guides for the Cable TV industry. Yes, in some cases they were not the greatest products, but I certainly learned a lot about guide technology in the process.
The first thing to keep in mind is that while program guides seem like a pretty simple product, they are actually quite complicated behind the scenes. Further, developing for many different OS platforms (Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung, LG, Android TV / Google TV, Smartphones and Tablets) adds a lot of challenges to managing the product line. I’m assuming there are multiple code bases to be built, debugged and maintained.
Also, one of the greatest features is the in-home streaming capability of the device. This is not offered by many of the competitors’ products (yet). All this for a two-tuner device currently on sale for $69.95… with no charge for TV listings.
I have several Roku devices and an Amazon Firestick 4K Max that I use, plus iPhones and iPads. My comments are based on observations from using these devices.
Reliability and Performance
Let’s not forget that the purpose of Tablo is watching TV and the consumers’ expectation is that it will work every time and have reasonable performance when using the interface. A “blue screen” of death is not acceptable. The recent server issues, that prevented users from watching TV, are the worst kind of product failure and should have the highest priority in terms of the next product releases. As can be inferred from Tablo comments in this community, they recognize the issue and are working on App modifications that will allow users to tune to channels when there are server issues. Superbowl anyone?
From a performance perspective, it takes what seems a long time to bring up the program information screen when a program is selected and a very long time for the channel to start playing. I’m sure there may be some hardware/ network issues behind these delays, but it would be great if the development team could significantly reduce the time it takes to just start watching a channel. Human perception of time is not linear when waiting for something to happen, so even cutting the delays in half would be very desirable.
The number of keystrokes to achieve a goal is also worth considering. In the case of the Fire TV guide, it remembers which grid filtered view you last used (such as favorite channels) and comes up with that view until it is changed. This is not the case with the Roku version of the guide, and it’s quite annoying to have to pick the favorite channel view every time you start up the App. Tablo should study the most common uses cases and strive to reduce the number of keystrokes to complete the action.
Feature Improvements
I’m sure that every user has feature improvements to suggest… but it would be great if Tablo published a roadmap of what their plans are for the product line. Yes, there is risk in doing this, but the company would build a better relationship with its customers if it provided some guidance about what is under development. We understand that there is a next generation (ATSC3) product in the works, but how is that prioritized against improving the current products? Is there a plan to rationalize features across different platforms, and what are those features?
Some specific improvements that I would like to see… 1) Ability to tune channels without connection to the servers, 2) Feature consistency across the most widely used platforms, 3) An ability to change channels using the favorites channel list by pressing up/down on the remote (yeah… channel surfing with a pop up banner showing the program title) – without using the grid and program information screens to complete the process, 4) Cache the TV listings so that the product starts up without needing to connect to the servers (with background updates as needed), 5) Recording conflict notification on the Home page, not just when you go to the library, 6) FF/REW on recorded shows with image indication of the content under all conditions, 7) A portal for reporting incorrect channel lineups (I see some bad/funny issues on my configuration) with feedback on the problems / fixes, and 8) a real time signal meter for tweaking antenna placement – particularly for those challenging low VHF channels.
Bottom line, I’m a generally satisfied customer (perhaps because I recognize the challenges involved in building the product), but I would like to see improvements.