The root cause of continuing gen4 guide malfunctions is: it’s free. The F word. And sometimes you get what you pay for.
If we were paying for it, the service might be better to begin with. But as a freebie, we are stuck with whatever it is. Tablo could improve it, but again they have to pay for that, and they are not getting the money from us. A tough place to be for us, and for them.
Customers will leave because the guide does not work, but they don’t want to pay for a guide. If Tablo all of a sudden offered a paid guide, that would be admitting that the free guide was not good enough. Businesses don’t like to admit such things. And not clear to me if they could successfully incorporate such a change into their existing systems.
They can’t offer us a built-in alternate guide button; the alternate guide would want to get paid too. No more free guide. And free guide is built-in to the gen 4 business model. Might work in a pay-for-guide gen5.
Best solution in the next gen would be to have a manual record setting feature, IMO. Worked fine on our VCRs years ago. A great idea never dies Then users can refer to whatever trusted guide provider they want, free or not. But it would have to wait for gen5.
Tablo can’t offer a paid guide in gen4, that would mess up their business model. But it also messes up the current business model to promise a free guide, then not provide it at random times of random length, with random accuracy. But the alternatives cost money and somebody gots to pay, except nobody wants to. Like I said, confusing and disappointing for all concerned.
It would be great to be heading into a future gen5 with a lot of happy gen4 users, but here we are.
I understand frustrations are at an all time high when it comes to malfunctions with the Tablo 4th gen. Yes it can be a great piece of hardware but if it doesn’t meet your expectations then quick to talk bad about it. I get it people want it to work right out of the box and you should get what you paid for. But technology fails and left with more questions than answers. Yes the Tablo is not perfect but we also know the people are working hard on a solution and consumers are very impatient when it comes to things they want. We should be glad that the people of Tablo are even listening to the consumers and the problems that we face so they can tackle the problem and come up with a solution. It may not be in a timely manner but at least they’re trying.
I am OK with the free guide and how it works. First major type problem in 10++ years is pretty good I think out of Tablos from my experience. The problem is also not even everything, think I missed 1% of the guide data, not the huge deal some couch potatoes are making I feel. If missing 1% of guide data a few days is the worst thing going on, I am OK with it.
Conspicuously absent from these discussions is Tablo support.
The fact that funding may be an issue does not excuse their silence.
Status should be provided with a candid, transparent and honest view of the situation. Anything short of that is unprofessional and disrespectful to the Tablo community.
I had the same thoughts…the guide issue problem is likely financial, not technical. It would be great if Tablo could be candid about it, but all big companies try to hide the unpleasant truth from the public.
Just seems to me we are all, Tablo and the users together, backed into a corner with gen4. Tablo has a chance to make improvements in Gen5. The various decision makers will have to decide what changes to make, and a paid for guide might be one of them. Note if there is not sufficient revenue stream, not just the guide suffers, but also the general reliability of the Tablo network.
IF there is a gen 5, it won’t sell after this gen 4 debacle. At least not many who are aware of this POS will buy into a new ‘improved’ model. I really regret buying a gen 4 and wish I had spent the time and money into something else.
I ran into a similar issue mid-2024 and returned mine. Then, I bought one again in Oct 2024 and lived through the Roku issue and other outages.
Since those issues the unit has been performing better and better for us. My wife is happy using it, which is the real litmus test.
All in all, once the Guide is corrected, I’m hoping we all can get back to using the Tablo trouble-free, as it was meant to be.
We’ll see in a few more days…
EDIT: if we hadn’t bought and used the Gen4 as our main device, we’d still be 100% on the OG Legacy and not having any Guide issues - just that blip of an outage on the 27th-28th.
I have a number of legacy units but bought a gen 4 in October of 2023. I’ve asked since day one where manual recording was and when it might be implemented. It’s the escape mechanism for when these guide problems occur.
I guess tablo cared too much about collecting metrics then implement manual recording.
I used to use a Channel Master DVR+. I obviously like the Tablo better since that is what I use now. However, while the Tablo is overall better, there were some advantages to the DVR+. It absolutely did not require an Internet connection at all, and that includes guide data. If you had an Internet connection, you would get a full 2 weeks of comprehensive guide data like you get with Tablo. However, if you left the network port empty, it would get a couple of days worth of guide data from PSIP. The PSIP data is less comprehensive and did not indicate whether an episode was new or not, but it was always available. The DVR+ did require a direct connection to the television via HDMI, but not only was Internet not required, no network connection of any kind was required.
I would like to see the Tablo be able to utilise PSIP data as a supplement for missing guide data and be the only source when fully offline (like the DVR+ did).
Tablo really needs to add manual recording by time and this problem of guide goes away.
They still can collect your manual record times they just have extra work to parse it out for meaningful data. I like my Tablo 4th generation but they did miss the boat of no manual record option!
I don’t mean to belittle those that are genuinely having problems, I don’t doubt that your problems are real and frustrating, but I have had relatively few problems with my Gen4 4-tuner. Yes, the Roku OS14 debacle was frustrating, but I had workarounds that worked. I have lived through a few outages. I wasn’t happy about it, but they got resolved. But, mine… once I got the antenna and my home network squared away… for the most part just works.
I remember when I had cable and a big storm would take down wires and I would have no service for days, sometimes weeks. When I switched to DirecTV I still had occasional outages. It happens.
My Tablo was a little over $100.00. When I was considering it my wife asked “what about when it becomes obsolete?” I figured for $100.00 even if I only used it for a short time I would come out ahead. By my math, It has saved me about $1500 after only about a year. Not perfect, but a bargain. Could it be better, sure. But, as they push out updates it continues to (mostly) improve.
If someone knows of a superior product at anywhere near the price point I will switch in a minute, but I don’t think one exists.
I’m baffled as to why they don’t use PSIP just for the 2 to 3 day guide data. All other data beyond that, like program descriptions, etc can come from somwhere else.
Oh, by the way, the PSIP guide on my bare bones tv doesn’t have any problems.
I am in basic agreement with you. However the length of these recent outages and their randomness got me looking at alternatives.
I went through the Roku and Tablo update weirdness, which really annoyed me, and which led me to buy an ONN puck to use till Roku and tablo worked it out. Might still be using ONN if I was not so set in my ways with the Roku UI.
Curiously, the guide is not yet filled in completely on any of my devices, but it is more filled in on the ONN than on Roku and iOS.
I still believe a lot of Tablo’s operating problems are due to how they are trying to shoestring operations (no fee) in order to appeal to the widest buying public (low cost). Ironically, those are the exact same people who are least equipped IMO to deal with the snafus that are common in Tablo usage.
I did the same thing (buying an ONN when the Roku went screwy). Now I hop between both when one is a problem. But both seem to have problems often. It’s like the programmers never got together and unified the interfaces. I have no issues with any other app on either unit. We are kinda stuck with this ‘bubble gum and baling wire’ Tablo system. I’m looking into Plex. I don’t really want to go thru all the set up and expense, but these issues certainly are driving me that way.
With Plex, you get everything else that you get with Plex. It’s a bigger world. However, that, if you have media that you want to serve up. Otherwise, no, Plex doesn’t make sense really.
