Earlier this year when I was evaluating Tablo 4th as a Fire TV Recast replacement, the initial AI support was much better than the subsequent human support.
The AI was fast, acknowledged what I was saying and gave the usual things to try. When those didn’t work it “escalated” it to a human. All in just a few hours of email exchanges.
The human(s) never acknowledged what I was saying and appeared to not understand or chose to ignore what I was reporting.
They wanted me to do all the things the AI had told me to do and that I had reported back, as if they didn’t have access to or didn’t bother to read my AI session.
With help from these forums I finally determined that the problem I was having was just how the Fire TV streaming box works with the Tablo: When you press a forward or reverse button to jump ahead, it always ends up in pause and you have to press play. So you can’t just click/click/click to jump ahead without also pressing play at the end to resume.
For people who just sit and watch a show that probably isn’t a problem, but for those of us who like to jump over stuff–commercials or slow segments–it’s annoying after being used to just skip-watch-skip.
So I returned the Tablo and about then the Recast’s schedule problems resolved and in general it works really well. (Record and playback work fine without an Internet connection for previously scheduled programs and if the power goes out during a recording it picks back up if power comes back on before the show is over.)
If Tablo changes the skip behavior I might revisit it but will also consider the Silicondust HDHomeRun.
(PS: At least Tablo HAS support. Even before Amazon discontinued it, they didn’t have any useful support, AI or human. Their forums have people who are listed as “Amazon Staff” but who sometimes say they aren’t employees, and who ALWAYS tell you to jump through the usual hoops even weeks after others have been saying “We know about the problem and are techs are working on it…”)
