I love the Tablo community here too. I think its hilarious that we all know that eachother works in IT. You'd think we'd get sick of thinking about IT stuff all day. Guess thats why we made a career out of it!
Here’s a major contradiction for you, an oxymoron if you will - I am extreme ADHD and hate change, but work in IT because I like fast pace and something different every day. Anyone who can figure THAT out gets 10 Tablo community points to spend as you see fit.
While I am aching for a road map, I understand their point and being small, it’s hard to have a really long term plan in place and keep to it while filling all the smaller although big requests for “stuff”. I can see both sides, I guess. I want that roadmap as bad as anyone as where I jumped in it would sure help me make some decisions, on the other hand, I see their point and also want to see them blow away competition.
Here’s another contradiction - I don’t believe they HAVE any competition. They aren’t in the same class as other devices or systems.
Over a year ago we were having trouble finding DRV-RW disks and were getting tired of sorting through piles of disks, loading each one and looking for specific shows or episodes and so on - and the fact that you must watch ALL recorded programs on a DVD before you can clear it off to make room for others. You can’t watch or delete ONE show, you have to format the disk and record over it again. Real convenient. Finding “DVRs” (digital video recorders) was impossible a year ago. Almost all of them required you subscribe to a service then you “got a DVR” in the bundle while paying a hefty monthly fee. Those that did exist, Magnavox and some others, I found were going out of production. I searched relentlessly for weeks, tried Amazon, eBay, Google searches and so on, nothing very good, they all had their hitches or else required a subscription to some satellite service or worse. Apparently due to the advent of Internet content, mobile devices, cable and satellite with their “Free” DVRs, the 2 or 3 companies that made such devices were stopping production, poor sales is what one such company told me directly “not worth it, no one buying”. I kept searching every few months and then suddenly I see a couple of companies making them again (or selling old stock!) and then I found Tablo - it was a dream come true for me as it’s almost exactly what I wanted (except for the trouble we’re going to have WATCHING recorded content due to not being Apple fiends)
I loved being able to choose my drive and drive size, appreciated that although it’s a bit of a hassle, it’s less hassle than moving a DVD recorder or VCR to another TV set to watch something, less hassle than the stacks of over 100 DVDs and several dozen OLD video tapes we have. I mean with 3 TVs, I don’t have to have 3 recorders or players or have to unplug and disconnect it from here and move it to there. If the drive goes bad I don’t have to box up and ship back a unit just to get a new drive installed. I grab another off my shelf and we move on. And when we are gone and there are TWO shows we’re gonna miss, no we aren’t, I’ll record 'em both while we’re away.
There is simply no comparison, nothing even close to this IMO. And SPACE SAVING. Even our DVD recorder takes more space than this. And I can put it any place in the house. Right now it’s sitting on a shelf on the bottom part of an end table. No need to touch or see it unless you can’t communicate with it, then you look for the blue LED. Their support blows away support of most other companies in the video recording business.
Yeah, I’m frustrated about a couple of things and one of them is still in flux, but I haven’t given up and seeing how fast these people move, I’m going to keep this device and see how things go, I’ve still got 3 weeks to decide if I can make some device work as a go-between so we can WATCH recorded shows without having to pull out my Toshiba notebook and having to not use it while one of us watches a recorded show. (anyone got an old but not TOO old Android 4.1xx based device for sale cheap that could serve as a remote control and streaming go-between for us?)
(Personally I want a Google Nexus tablet but can’t afford the new ones and don’t want a really old one either. Maybe we can still get the Kindle fire to work but I do need a tablet for myself for my car shows and trips…)
Anyway, sort of funny, I got into IT when my now ex-B-I-L saw how quickly I picked up computers and such in the mid-1980s. I was doing better than the comp-sci grads he was hiring as I picked it up naturally. I’m a trained auto tech, degree and awards and all but life changes got me going a different direction when I needed a job and I walked right into IT and have been constantly moving up ever since, jumping 2 levels at one point, and now the de facto network administrator because I solved a few unsolvable issues and got a VPN gateway to work here where others said it wasn’t possible.
I hate change and have troubles paying attention but I guess other things make up for that as I’m, according to several folks, one of them a high school teacher, another a college professor, a natural born troubleshooter.
So getting Tablo to work is fun and fits right in with what I’ve been doing since the mid-80s. I’ve focused mostly on security but the networking part is actually sort of fun.
I’ve been asked - you work with xxxxxx all day, don’t you get sick of it? And you have how many computers at home? (5 or 6 if you count the older notebook in my shop I’m going to convert to Ubuntu for email and web use out there)
Oh, and I run a popular auto forum in my spare time, too - forum administrator, etc. with about 10,000 members and helped beta test a major web site for a celebrity who has a support site up in Canada. Anyone heard of Rick Green, Big Brain Productions, eh?
