NEW - Tablo Roku Channel Update (2.7.0)

Fantastic update…thanks.

The update seems to have gone through. However, about once a minute, the screen goes black, an arrow up and arrow down button appear and it reads select channel up or down. The little circle spins for a few seconds, then it goes back to regular TV. Any ideas?

Reboot aka power cycle your Roku.

Is Quick Channel Select working as designed?

Let’s say you have 2 channel you are interest in. Channels 8 and 10.

  1. You start the tablo app and go to Live TV. Down arrow to channel 8 and hit play button. It starts playing.

  2. You then use the new up/down button and the new menu appears. You see nothing of interest on menu. But you notice the red channel 8 signal tuned flashing.

  3. You hit the left arrow and return to channel 8 live tv.

  4. you use the back arrow to main Live TV menu

  5. you down arrow to channel 10 and hit play. Once it starts live TV play you hit the up/down for the new menu.

  6. the new menu appears. You see both channels 8 and 10 are red. But there is no return to 8 selection.

  7. You hit left button and return to channel 10 Live TV.

  8. You hit the back arrow and return to main Live TV menu. Channel 8 is still red but channel 10 has been deselected(non-red).

Step 7 should return you to channel 8. Left arrow goes to the last channel you were on before the current one.

Don’t know about the rest, except don’t trust the red flashing channel indicator.
It’s inconsistent.

Step 5 tuned channel 10 via main Live TV menu. You are watching channel 10. Step 6 brings up new menu. You don’t see a return option to channel 8.

So you hit the left arrow return to full screen channel 10. You then use back arrow to return to main Live TV menu.

I only see channel 8 as red (tuned) and not channel 10.

I’ve used tablo for 4 years and never seen the flashing red tuner assigned as faulty when the channel select is occurring from the same media player.

Thank you! This was a nice surprise… Keep up the good work…

WOW! Loading is faster, channel changes are snappy. Watch mostly recorded shows this, update makes LIVE TV much more enjoyable. Thanks Tablo!!

Very nice feature! Good work!

Glad to hear everyone’s enjoying this new feature! We’ve been pretty excited to unveil it!

@zippy - Right now the main Live TV grid and the Quick Channel Select are not as tightly integrated as we’d eventually like them to be. Having memory between the two guides is something we’ll be working on as we move forward, but we wanted to get the basic functionality out there first.

As for the flashing indicators, they will only be showing as active if you’ve been on the channel less than 3 minutes ago.

We changed the ‘blink’ feature a while ago because there was some confusion that this meant there was ongoing recordings. It doesn’t change the behavior (the channel is still actively tuned for up to an hour after) just the indicator.

That being said, we’re always open to revisiting these changes in light of this new functionality.

Awesome update! Everything seems faster. PLEASE Tablo, sell this technology to the other apps on Roku – especially DirectTV Now!

Thanks again!!

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That’s an interesting explanation of the blink integration between the new menu and the original Live TV menu.

In the example I outlined above. Both channel 8 and channel 10 were “played” via the old/original Live TV menu.

Channel 10 was the last channel tuned. The new menu showed both are red blinking. But on return to channel 10 and then back arrow to main Live TV menu, only channel 8 was red. Not the last used which was channel 10.

And hitting the play again on channel 10 doesn’t give you the warm fuzzy feeling that the tuner didn’t have to be reselected.

No matter how quickly you change channels, you’ll never see more than 3 channels flashing red, and sometimes only 2.
Red flashing channel does mean the channel is tuned, but a channel that isn’t flashing red does not mean it is not tuned.

This is a welcome new feature. It also seems like this update has improved FF and Rewind when watching live TV.

Tablo you better watch out that your EXCELLENT AWESOME coders don’t go to DirecTV Now or others. I LOVE how much Tablo has improved since I got it 3+ years ago.

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It helps that we’re up in Canada so it’s a bit harder to move down south.

Plus, we have free ice cream sandwiches in the freezer right now. How could you pass that up?

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If you want to have a little understanding of how the tablo maybe assigning and deassigning tuners I would use a tablo app, like Roku, that uses restful API’s.

Then, depending on whether you have a 2-tuner versus 4 tuner model, schedule 4 recordings for the same time (say 8 PM for 1 hour) on 4 different major channels: 8, 10, 12, 14. Then schedule 2 different recording to start( say 9 PM) on 2 different channels (say 30 and 40) at the end of first recording.

Start the app and enter the Live TV menu.

You can now use the Roke Live TV menu to watch the tuners be selected and deselected via the flashing red lights on the channel. This also includes the flashing red lights for recordings that are well into the extend live recording option.

I’m not talking about when tablo has to select a tuner to transcode recording or Live TV to transfer to remote devices. Those tuner assignments may not or will not show up on the Live TV menu.