Hi all:
I have been active in this forum for a few months and feel like I know some you but I thought it might be nice to have a “Introduce Yourself” thread.
@TabloSupport would you consider pinning this thread?
I live in the Sandhill's of North Carolina. The area is also called the home of Golf in the USA. We have 4-+ courses in a 10 sq.mile area. I worked in the automotive industry for many years for manufacturers of automotive interiors. I am a Mechanical Engineer by degree and a Wisconsin Badger (Final Four Baby)!
I left automotive in 2006 for obvious reasons and started a custom software development company with a colleague who also left automotive. We had several clients in the Research Triangle Park in Raleigh NC so we moved the company and ourselves to Holly Springs NC. We sold or company to a client in 2013 and I moved to Southern Pines, bought a house in a golf community, and planned to kick back and relax.
Shortly after moving a small local automotive company called and said they found me on LinkedIn and wanted to talk about a consulting gig. That turned into a full time position to allow me to join their group healthcare.
So I work full time and try to play golf as much as possible.
I cut the cord to help pay my yearly golf membership fees. I currently save about $100 USD a month by cutting DirecTV, adding Sling TV, and keeping Netflix, and Amazon Prime. I have 50 Mbps up/down service and the Nighthawk X6 router. I also use PLEX for all my BluRay rips.
Randy
I live in Nashville, TN and have lived in the area most of my life. I work at a large hospital company doing performance testing of healthcare-related software applications. I have a computer science degree from Austin Peay State University (Let’s Go Peay!)
I have used about all the paid tv services available to me (Comcast, Uverse, Dish, and DirecTv), usually switching after my contract was up. While my family and I do enjoy watching a variety of channels, the combination of Tablo, SlingTv, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Crunchyroll have satisfied our tv needs. I feel lucky to have a 50 Mbps/5 Mpbs internet connection via Uverse, and Google Fiber will be here sometime in the next year or so.
I do enjoy travel (just got back from London for spring break), watching sports (Titans season ticket holder), playing bridge, going to movies, video games, and participating on various message boards.
Snowcat comes from my first online persona, on the (now extinct) Interplay message boards for games like Icewind Dale.
I grew up an Air Force Brat, then joined the Navy and spent 5 years there. After getting out, I got an Associate degree in Computer Programming.
I live in Austin, TX (since Nov 1987) and used to be a mainframe COBOL programmer. The last few years we also used LINC, which of all things generated COBOL but not code that a person would want to maintain. I didn't see technology changing soon enough...should have gone back to college to learn LAN Admin. I started after being fired, but never finished...I found a job.
My internet speedtest is http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4251102805
I have a network in my apartment with a LINCSYS EA3500. I cut cable because I stopped and figured out I was paying for to many channels and not watching it often enough. I already had a Mohu Leaf while KXAN and Time Warner played chicken for a month. I saw how clear the signal was compared to what the cable provided and thanks to them dropped cable altogether. I recently added www.ustvnow.com for streaming. I searched Amazon for OTA DVR and found the Tablo and had placed a 2 tuner version. While the order was still pending I saw mention of buy a 4 tuner Tablo and get the 1 TB disk FREE, so I canceled Amazon (and avoided sales tax) and got the Tablo and disk from Newegg. I have a Roku 3 in the living room and a Roku LT in the bedroom (old TV - only RF interface so have a modulator too) but the TV was FREE. When it dies, I will get a small HDMI TV for the bedroom and get the latest model Roku or other box. The Roku 3 and Tablo are both on the 5 ghz network wifi and the Roku LT is on the 2.4 ghz. I am a beta tester for Tablo on the Roku and Android.
@TabloSupport would you consider pinning this thread?
Done :)
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Hello everyone! I officially became a cord cutter yesterday. My DirecTV was cancelled at midnight on Saturday and I hooked up my antenna and Tablo yesterday 
I’m Johnny Foreigner, me…born, raised and educated overseas. I moved to to the US in 2008 when I got a job transfer. Lived in the Southeast until 2013, when I moved to Seattle. Now I work for the big software company that everyone loves to hate.
I first cut the cord using my TiVo when I still lived down south. Once I got into the current house that is fully wired for Ethernet, Roku suddenly became the centerpiece of the TV viewing experience. So when I stumbled across Tablo as the solution to watching recorded shows on any TV in the house I was sold on it.
I live in Lakeville, MN (suburb of Minneapolis). I’m a software engineer working for IBM.
Finally convinced my wife recently that we should cut the cord and began looking for solutions to accommodate our TV viewing habits. Stumbled across the Tablo when I was looking for a DVR solution and was swayed by the availability of the 4-tuner, external hard drive, and access from anywhere. My house was already pre-wired with coax running to the attic, so installing an antenna was fairly easy (went with the RCA ANT751) and I am able to receive all of the stations I was expecting with very good signal strength. I’ve had the Tablo setup for a couple weeks and have been playing with it a bit. Currently still have cable TV service, but am expecting to cancel that as soon as I can get my hands on the new Tablo apps for Fire TV and Roku so that my wife’s experience is a little better than what I can show her now.
Liking what I see from Tablo (Nuvyyo) and the community and looking forward to the features and improvements to come.
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#ONWisconsin, had to start it off right since the Badgers are in the Final Four. I am a computer programmer in RPG and SQL with some VB knowledge mixed in. I work in a small IT shop so we do our own design / testing / coding all ourselves. I like to get outside and shoot pistols and rifles, play poker and watch tv.
I had DTV for 15 years and bought Tablo about 4 months ago. Ran my Tablo side by side with DTV for a few months until my contract was up. It's been almost a month without DTV and I don't miss them. They apparently miss me based on the numerous emails and calls I received with "12 month" offers for a 24 month contract. No thanks.
My setup is as follows. I have a 4x2 HDMI switch in the living room with my inputs being Roku3, Amazon Stick, Chromecast and DVD player. I have 2 TV's in the living room which is why I have the 4x2 splitter. I can put any one of the 4 inputs on either of the tvs. This allows me to watch 2 games at once or put the game on the smaller TV(until it gets good) while watching shows on the big tv. I also have a Roku 3 on my Bedroom TV.
After seeing my setup my sister bought a Tablo when Newegg had their Free HD deal. Saving over $80/month going forward.
I live in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Wife and I decided to cut the cord last month and we haven’t looked back. Added a Tablo this week to add live ota TV to our lineup of hulu, sling and Amazon and we haven’t missed cable at all. Plus we’re saving nearly $130 a month.
The tablo has been great and we’re eagerly awaiting the native Fire TV app!
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Just got my 4-Tuner Tablo. Very easy installation. Will be cutting the U-Verse cord soon and saving $102 a month. Thinking about getting a Roku for the living room. So far have been watching he Tablo TV feed on Apple I-Pad. I have an Apple TV in living room and another in my home office.
So far I am very impressed by the product. Only complaint is the lack of surround sound. Might be limiting for the living room set-up.
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@eheinzeIf you get a Roku, make sure it’s a Roku 3.
Can I ask why? I know it’s faster and has an SD slot, but I have two Roku Streaming Sticks, a Roku 1 and a Roku 2 and have yet to find any limitations…plus, I like having the analog/composite outs for my older TVs. Just curious if I’m missing something…
Mike
During the Sling TV test people with sticks had problems. Roku 3 is the lastest and fastest. The Roku 4 might be out soon. You also might look at FireflyTV (I have not used it but have read good reviews of it)
Good discussion guys but lets keep this thread on topic.
Hi I currently live in Houston Texas and have been living here for about 18 years now. I work in IT for an energy company doing Enterprise Architecture for our Retail business. I have a Biological Sciences and Anatomy/Neurobiology degree from Colorado State University, obviously not really doing what I went to school for, but that is a different story.
I finally divorced Uverse in June 2014 when the Tablo 4 Tuner model came to market because I grew tired of the annual negotiation for current “deals” and found that the majority of TV we were watching was really on the local broadcast channels anyway. While there were a couple of shows outside of this it wasn’t worth paying for the overheard of it. Since we have young children we also watch a lot of time shifted content on our schedule, very rarely watching anything live at time of broadcast. This ended up saving us approximately $100/month. The major hurdle was passing the “wife and kids” usability test. Last thing you want to do is introduce something that makes them have to constantly debug issues to watch tv… just makes life miserable for you..who wants to be a constant helpdesk? I thought at first the kids would struggle not having Disney and other cable channels, but then supplemented them with Netflix and they now watch on demand whatever they like. We have found the Netflix catalog for animated content to be sufficient.
For local tv we are pretty lucky here to have a broadcast farm where all the transmitters are located in a single place, Missouri City, I just needed a strong enough roof antenna to reach the signal since that farm was around 40 miles away and something in attic wouldn't work with the radiant barrier installed.
My Internet profile is 100/10 http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4263407177 and I use a combination of Asus and Apple ac routers with a cisco managed switch to manage my home network. (I have two routers now because I wanted to introduce a router where I had more QoS control, especially for the kids, something that Apple doesn’t expose from their devices). I also purchased my cable modem from Amazon for about $60 dollars so that I wouldn’t have to pay the $10/month rental fee from Comcast.
For performance reasons I have chosen to hard wire my Tablo, Roku 3, and AppleTv 3 directly into the LAN vs relying on WiFi. I don’t experience any buffering issues if I choose to watch Netflix of Tablo using my laptops or tablets over WiFi but still prefer to keep the network traffic segregated from other things the kids might be doing. I also connected the RG69 connections from the antenna straight to each TV so it could be watched without using the media streaming devices in live mode if wanted.
My personal life revolves around living vicariously through my kids, block parties, scouting activities, and also attending Houston Texans games as a season ticket holder (even though I am a life long Denver Bronco fan). Hey, its football…… and JJ Watt is one bad dude….
Cut the cord several years ago. I had been using EyeTV on a Mac Mini as it was just about the only OTA DVR solution I could find. I was never that thrilled with the EyeTV performance/stability and when I decided to re-purpose the Mac Mini as our main household computer, I did another Google search for OTA DVR and was pleasantly surprised to discover Tablo. So far it seems to be working fine. I use the iPad interface and already had an AppleTV. Hoping this will be be a long term solution for me as I do not watch a ton of TV, but like to have the DVR capability for live viewing and occasional recording. Thanks for stepping up with this solution!
I live in Gibsonville, NC between the Triad and Triangle Markets. I cut the cord with Dish Network last December and purchased the Clearstream 4 antenna. We use a Roku 3 and Roku LT for Amazon Prime, Netflix, and SlingTV. We have the highest DSL speed that Centurylink offers in our area (8MB). With SlingTV, we save a little over $50 monthly over our previous bundled Dish Network plan.
We started out with a Simple TV device for DVR functionality. Honestly, it worked fine, but Tablo's development (Roku Revamp) and other 3rd party reviews convinced me to jump in. I can pull about 44 OTA channels right now with almost any tuner, including Tablo. I can get all of the local broadcast networks including a lot of redundant programming (MeTV, ThisTV, etc.).
The name is Randy, and I’m not your average Tablo TV owner - I’m not a cord cutter, and I can’t imagine what it would take to get me to become one. I subscribe to DirecTV, and while I wish it were cheaper we want it, we can afford it and we have it.
I’m a Tablo TV owner because my house sits on top of one of the largest hills in my area and faces west. I don’t live in tornado alley, but my area of Northern Kentucky has seen its share of very severe weather. In fact, 3 years ago I stood in front of my living room window and watched very ominous looking clouds roll across the valley from southwest to northeast. I remarked that a tornado had to be coming from that funnel cloud.
Sure enough.
The tornado hit to my east and ripped up parts of Kentucky and Ohio, killing several people. My DirecTV was out thanks to the storm, as was my cable Internet access. I learned from my neighbors that cable TV was out as long as my Internet, which was back on the next day. I didn’t have an antenna hooked up that worked well enough to bring in a signal, so aside from a generic warning from weather radio we had no indication that this cell came so close to us and our then 2 month old infant daughter.
Now, I have Mohu antenna that brings in signal through the nasty weather, and I’m using my Tablo TV to distribute OTA to all of my TV’s in the house. Currently I’m using Google Cast, but as soon as it is released I’ll be switching to the Android TV app. I watch a lot of the things on broadcast networks that a person paying for TV would normally watch that way on the Tablo. I stream local news and sports via Tablo Connect as often as I need to, an attempt to get a better experience than Slingbox and to maximize my unlimited data plan on T-Mobile.
I love the technology stuff, and I’m very interested in TV and steaming media, so I’d likely own a Tablo even without what I consider to be such a good reason.
Hows it going i just bought a 4-tuner about a month ago because why waste $75 a month it will pay for itself in 4 months although when i called dish to cut the cord they told me i could get the welcome to dish package for $20 a month. Then they told me they would put me on a vacation hold for 9 months so i could watch what i had on my hard drive and with this any free preview they happen to be showing you get that to i just had the starz cineplex preview i also convinced them to wave the $5 a month vacation hold fee and this is with no contract for 20 months it really didn’t take to much convincing so before you cut get a little extra from the crooks. Sorry about my bad typing but i have really shaky hands i,m from Heber City Utah and i am not a polygamist ha ha keep up the great work and as for the post above this we have had some wild wind hope it doesn’t get to you. we use the roku 1 but have to wait to upgrade till the coffers fill back up also i should have bought a 2-terabyte hd.
see ya Ken