In Roku apps like Netflix, Amazon, Acorn, etc when watching a series of episodes, the app remembers the last watched episodes and, upon return by any device using that account (not just that Roku), offers the last partially watched episode or the next episode in the series.
On clicking into a series on Tablo, one always starts at the top of the list above all ‘other seasons’ episodes and above all episodes of the most recent season. This means one might need to click down through dozens of episodes to get back to the ‘next episode’.
I didn’t find another request for this, but perhaps I’ve missed it as I’d have thought it was already requested. Anyway, to be sure it’s been suggested:
Tablo keeps in the database a marker for the most recent episode of a series that has been watched / is being watched.
When a Tablo app clicks into a series and enters the ‘episodes’ area, the initially highlighted episode is (in order)
last episode that was watched and not completed
next unwatched episode by episode number if the last episode was in a numbered season (e.g. Season 7 episode 10 comes after episode 9)
earliest unwatched episode in the next season if the previous episode was the last currently recorded for the last-watched season
next episode recorded chronologically if the last episode was in an ‘other seasons’ listing because the program guide didn’t have season/episode data
Example- I’m currently recording / watching Barney Miller episodes- a great oldie. There are 4 episodes broadcast per day here, so they’re recording faster than I’m watching them right now. It took 60 clicks of the down arrow to get to the current episode last time I came into the series since there had been a lot of newer season/episodes recorded relative to my current ‘watching point’
I would love to have something like this! That would be a huge help for picking up somewhere mid season or show.
We have almost the entire series of Seinfeld recorded, but try sorting through 10 Seasons… It would be great to have the interface act like IOS where you can easily select the season and then see the episodes.
Absolutely want to add my “vote” for this feature too. I use my Tablo primarily with Roku. I also record a lot of the “oldie” shows like “Barnie Miller,” and it would save a great deal of wear-and-tear on both my aging brain circuits AND my Roku remote. Thanks for the consideration. (After only using Tablo for less than a week, I’m still convinced you Tablo guys have bona fide wizards for programmers, don’t you?)
How about Childish Behavior where one member smacks another in the back of the head while watching something we have already seen and says “we already saw the part where the …”
It’s a trade-off between tracking by device (so your kids’ Roku stays in a different place than the living room Roku) and tracking by ‘last used’. ‘Last used’ may be frustrating if you have four people watching the same series on four different Rokus. Conversely (and this is a WAY COOL feature if you don’t have different users watching the same series on different devices), if as I described it above Tablo just tracks the last watched episode for a given series on that Tablo (regardless of access device), you gain the ability to stop playback of Show episode X in the kitchen, move to the living room or bedroom, go into the Tablo App and immediately pick up where you’d stopped. This is how several of my other streaming apps work. This approach is also easier on Tablo developers, since it only has to track one index per TV series, instead of one index for every device that’s ever watched an episode in that TV series.
I have a 60 inch TV in the family room using a Roku. I have a wife and 2 teenage children. We all like Jimmy Fallon. But not everyone likes the same episodes of Jimmy Fallon based on the various guests.
So if this feature is implemented per device I need to tell my wife and children they can’t watch the Jimmy Fallon show on the big TV in the family room if I’m watching Jimmy Fallon?
It’s not that they can’t watch any episode they wish on any device. It would just mean a change in which episode is initially highlighted when you select a series to watch.
Current behavior: you pick the Tonight Show, then (in Roku) click the ‘episodes’ button or down arrow and the app is highlighting the episode at the very top of the episodes list, then you click the down arrow 20 times or 50 times or whatever it takes to get to the episode you’re looking for.
Proposed behavior: you pick the Tonight Show, then (in Roku) click the ‘episodes’ button and the app is highlighting the episode that was last played. If that happened to be you, hooray, you just click OK and start playback. If the last viewer was someone else that watched a different episode, then you’d have to use the up or down arrow to move to the episode you want to watch. I suspect this behavior is only ‘worse’ for you if you wanted an episode that was close to the top of the list and whoever played an episode from the series last was watching something from the bottom of the list.
If the four of you are all watching episodes from the same season (say they’ve just watched episode 37 and you want to watch episode 43), this would still save all of you a lot of keypresses, it’s just not quite as cool as when it’s helping one viewer track their place in a series that others aren’t watching.
Actually, I’m not a digital hoarder. And if I were I wouldn’t be saving my recordings on the tablo disk. I would be using the tablo ripper to move them elsewhere. So my episode lists never contain more the 15 episodes. There are only so many hours in a day to watch all the potential shows/episodes available via OTA.
