As a new Tablo user who has read through many postings in this community, it seems that the “pairing” is too fragile. All that it takes, apparently, for a pairing to fall apart is for
the dynamic routable IP address at the Tablo router to change (as dynamic IP addresses are expected to do from time to time). As another example all that it takes (as I have seen with my own eyes) to make a pairing fall apart is to follow the advice of one poster to the community who suggested (in response to some problem or another) the uninstallation of the Fire TV Stick app and then reinstalling it. Other events that ought to make no difference at all, such as an incremental update of the Tablo firmware or an update of the Fire TV stick firmware, seem to present the risk of a pairing falling apart.
Given that the Tablo makers advertise the “away from home” feature as a reason to buy a Tablo, and a reason to pay $150 for a lifetime ability to do “away from home” viewing … the Tablo makers need to make the “pairing” less fragile.
Let’s start with the very predictable event that a dynamic routable IP address (WAN address) at the Tablo router will change from time to time. That’s what dynamic IP addresses do! No one should be surprised that a dynamic WAN IP address changes from time to time. As such, the Tablo makers need to make the “pairing” work as well as
a DynDNS function. The Tablo needs to send a message periodically to the pairing server that will reveal to the pairing server any event of a dynamic WAN IP address changing. (Maybe you will tell me that Tablo version 2.2.8 does this DynDNS-like reaction to a change in the WAN IP address, in which case this is good news.)
The smart way to make things sticky is to tie the pairing to a unique identifier in the Tablo and to a unique identifier in each paired device. Importantly these unique identifiers need to be unaffected by installing or uninstalling an app. In the case of a Fire TV stick this should probably be its MAC address. In the case of the Tablo this should probably be its MAC address. If this is done smartly, then when I uninstall and reinstall the Tablo app on my Fire TV stick, the app would send the MAC address (or a hash of the MAC address) to the pairing server, and the already established pairing relationship could be revived.
One of the big benefits of making pairing more sticky would be that an away-from-home user could do an unpair-re-pair for troubleshooting purposes without losing the pairing.
