I have received that e-mail, and I am happy that they won’t be able to update automatically anymore. I will do the update myself when I’m sure that it doesn’t affect my tablo. I remember that one of those auto-update gave me a lot of problems for over a month, before tablo corrected the problem.
This may be related to the upcoming changes regarding contacting customers in Canada. Soon businesses will not be allowed to contact customers (via Internet technologies) unless the business has express permission for that specific type of contact (they can no longer say “all”). This is put in place to cut down on various mass marketing issue.
It’s probably related to changes to CASL that come into effect July 1 2017.
The folks at Roku may be interpreting as they aren’t allowed to even notify you there is an update available unless you agree. They may be right about that too. I’m not an expert in the field so I really have no idea.
I’ve had a Roku for years (since the Roku 2 XS was new) and a Tablo since December 2016. I’ve not had issues with any updates in that time (although I only had one or two updates).