I know this question might have been posted before, but I am not finding a specific answer to this.
Why is there a dependency on having an internet connection to watch over the air TV? I understand this would be needed for scheduling DVR functions and such, but I find it is a bit lacking of a feature to have in the event of an ISP outage or a global internet problem. Since I live in a rural area, power is often interrupted and I need to use a generator (our internet obviously goes down during this time), but the whole reason I purchased the Tablo was to get around a limitation distance from my TV to our roof antenna by way of WiFi which works great except in the event of T-Storms or a Tornado in the area, which is really when I need it the most. What would be the need for such an item when the signal is being brought in fine through the TV tuners? And I kind of wonder how much data is getting transferred by the Tablo in general, this would be because if I were to go wireless there is an AUP with most wireless providers that I need to be careful of, i.e. if I download 5gigs of data I hit a cap on my bandwidth, thus the reason I stick with Coax/Cable at this point. My options are limited. Seems like a great over sight in this product, and certainly “cutting the wire” is by no means an adequate advertisement although it is listed in the fine print…
The simplest reason is that the guide data comes from the internet, not the OTA EPG that your TV uses.
A harmless reason is that you need the internet to access any of the FAST stations.
One evil intention is to force you to open to the home screen and stare at content you’re not interested in.
A more nefarious reason might be that if it didn’t require the internet, they couldn’t show you the stations they own, hoping for more ad revenue.
This chaps my butt cheeks. It gets real itchy, right next to the brown eye…
Where you buy a device and when it doesn’t scale to your needs, you complain about it.
Find a device that will scale to your needs. There are other vendors that could possibly fit your needs.
I ALSO live in a rural area… We do have power outages and internet outages. I have UPS’s on my rack and my living room TV. I also have a Fail Over internet source. I also have the quick ability of disconnecting the OTA antenna off the back of my Tablo and barrell connecting it to my living room TV cable jack. Bam! back in business!
One more thing… No where in the Zombie Survival Guide does it state to use a Tablo.
If you have real world emergencies going on. Like Tornadoes going on… Bruh, Come on man!
If I was in your shoes… I got a wife and 3 kids to worry about. Id be finding a solution rather complaining in the forums about it not scaling to your needs.
At this moment, it seems like I’m more prepared for an outage than you are… and we don’t get tornadoes.
Since the gen 4 uses WiFi to connect to any tv or tablet (there is no hdmi output), if power goes out, you would still need to power your router in order to watch OTA with or without ISP connectivity, presumably with the generator you mentioned. Most ISPs have some form of battery backup for at least a time, whether it is 5g home internet or cable. As long as your router is powered, you should be good for a while. If not, you could use a cell phone as a hot spot temporarily. My point is that without an HDMI connection, you are still dependent on WiFi with the gen 4, regardless of what data it needs from the internet to operate.
Great point but until Tablo allows the ability to change your network, this can be a confusing and sometimes complicated trick to accomplish.
On another of your points, it’s a lot to maintain power to all of your home devices during an emergency situation. The Tablo in the attic seems like a good way to send it to Oz!
The legacy models had a HDMI model. Did it require WiFI.
I’ve never needed to, but the iOS app has that capability. Click on the profile top right, then the device name, then “edit WiFi”. Update… interesting that I just checked and none of the android versions seem to have the capability to change WiFi. It appears this is only available in the iOS app. @TabloTV - why can’t the WiFi be changed in all apps and not just the iOS?
@KimchiGUN, @269587, and @wkh you make great points and I agree them but the OP makes a good point as well. IF you have power in your house with a generator and/or UPS and your LAN is up and functional, why should you not be able to watch OTA TV using the Tablo Gen 4 that is ALSO on your LAN? If the Tablo does not detect an internet connection (the WAN is down), then it can display on the Home page some message like “No Internet Connection Detected. Guide Updates and FAST channels will be unavailable.” Then you can go to Live and still tune in OTA channels.
I’m not complaining about it just curious why that couldn’t be implemented. It’s the reason I still keep my Tablo Legacy Quad 4 to watch OTA if the internet (WAN) goes down.
I’ve been waiting 10 months for the feature. It must be in the “coming soon” category.
Scaling to my needs versus false advertisement are two different things my friend. Only upon looking through the fine print of the device do you actually find the details of the product being short changed by needing an internet connection, and for what it is worth, you can mention that you have redundant xyz sitting in rack xyz, which doesn’t add up to much when your talking about purchasing a device to simply do what I thought it was intended to do based on the branding. I too have a complex setup, but I don’t prefer to expand on simplicity for the sake of a complicated and rather round about way to achieve a simple WiFi media hop. Your right, in the short of it simply connecting directly to coax to avoid the media hop is the ideal solution, but making use of what I have without having to build an entirely new and complex solution is simply all I was after. Let me ask this, is it really necessary to implement OSPF or iBGP in your home environment because you don’t want to run down to the basement and move cable “A” to port “B” when your ASR fails? No, but as a matter of preference I build the solution to not require that when I am several miles from home versus having to walk someone through it. I’m certainly not about to pony up the added cost of a redundant ISP either, as I am not running a compute center or cloud provisioning service either, but christ when I buy a Cisco 9000 series switch I certainly expect it to do switching without having an internet connection to do so.
For what it is worth, I am prepared as needed probably more so than you, but that is not the topic of discussion, mine was simply why does this product not work as initially advertised. Now I have go through the process of figuring out how this product does it’s stuff via captures and mimic the whole thing, which since I am certain it was build on top of open source, well I’m pretty sure there is call for it.
From what I have read, seems like many folks are. And I gotta say, whomever writes the code for the other apps (maybe third parties to Tablo) is falling quite short of quality assurance. Roku, horrible, LG TV, worse yet, Firestick I have not tested but will only not crossing my fingers on that one. Apple IOS seems to work rock solid, but I am not a fan of pulling out my glasses to watch TV. I haven’t tested Andriod either so.
You bring up an VERY interesting point. One thing I have noticed, and this may not be the case for all ISPs that are using hard wired scenarios, is that mine at least falls back to only support E-911 VoIP. I believe it is due in part to reduce energy consumption in the PO event. At least that’s what it seems based on the captures I’ve done during various outages. It’s a rather odd behavior too, maybe just my own, but, the only thing that I can derive is that certain traffic destine for anything but the VoIP gateway just goes unanswered. Of course, in a situation of needing to reach out to the world your are correct Cell service seems to be pretty steady even in a disastrous situation.
I have a power backup system that keeps my essentials going for at least a couple of days. I bought my legacy quad a few years ago hoping to be able to at least watch ota shows or at least play recorded shows.
Several things came to light with my first power failure. My backup worked great but the internet went away. It appears that the internet providers don’t backup their infrastructure like the old line phone companies did. Power would go out but the phone and dsl continued to work.
The Tablo wasn’t initially on my backup the first time power went out. Loss of power and internet kept the Tablo from checking in with the Tablo server on power up to do whatever it needed to do. I was highly disappointed.
Now that they are on the backup supply, loss of internet is only a problem when it needs to get something from the server. I’m able to watch the severe weather reports, etc for at least a while.
Hopefully the Tablo people are working on a fix for this. You should be able to watch OTA stations in the event of an internet blackout. My guess they have been so busy with getting all the different systems to work properly they do not have the resources to do other things.
The whole point of an OTA dvr is the ability to watch “OVER THE AIR TV”. You should be able to use the tuners whether there is an internet connection or not. Having to “switch over to a backup tv” when the tablo has perfectly good tuners is ridiculous at best.
P.S. - I’ve been using my Win 7 Media center with a quad tuner card as a dvr ever since win 7 came out. It makes my quad tuner tablo look like a crude, buggy pos.
Bro man… I get what you are saying.
If it doesn’t do what you want, then why bother with it? Return it and find a vendor that fits your needs.
IDK how hard that is. I can buy something, then it makes me miserable or mad and force myself to use it. Return it or eat the $99 to get something that will suite you.
Again, I was on the verge or buying an HDHomeRun from a friend of mine, when the servers were dropping back in Feb. I will eat my $99 to keep my wife off my A$$. Why would I keep the unit and make wife unhappy and that will make me unhappy. I will post in the forums about how unhappy I am with the unit. but then i don’t do anything about it. Make that make sense please?!?
Be honest, I hope I do not act like biter Tablo users when I hit retirement age. Because this is ridiculous at best!
Easy answer, publicity. As easily as I found the comments in other areas of this forum using a simply google search is as easily as I found answers to some of the questions I had earlier on in fitment of the product. Had there been more on topic about the lacking abilities of this unit to be used without internet I may not have gone this route, but what your @KimchiGUN suggesting seems to be rather counter productive in the long run. If no-one calls attention to something that is an impediment of the product, 1. How will anyone know about the deficit and 2. How will product makers know consumers see this as a refinement they can capitalize on or other? So, in short, sitting on your third eye doesn’t get the point across to anyone, other than the hassle of having to send something back and go through some return process…Make sense? @KimchiGUN here’s some preparation-H for your third eye…J/K LOL…
My brother in christ… There have been numerous post about this. If you didnt see those with your searches, thats on you.
When I bought my Tablo back in Dec 2023. I found multiple post (searched in the forum) that users were mad about needing the internet. I was like oh ok, lets see how this goes.
I got gallons of P-H for my brown eye… its locked and loaded. LOL.
I wasn’t really searching for Tablo OTA TV and internet dependency as much as I was looking for fitment regarding the abilities I would be using to view such, but I get it, and those items along with their various short comings are, albeit disappointing, are manageable. Thus the start of this more direct on topic thread. I suspect there is a way around this internet dependency, depending on how deep I really want to go on reverse engineering what it is really doing in the back ground, whether it be mimicking a SOA for tablotv.com and pointing it one of my own boxes for 443 along with payload, or maybe as simple as providing it NTP as it so desires often for no apparent reason to paladin.latt.net. I don’t know wtf it is doing with google’s 8.8.8.8 and udp 30000+ in the wee hours of the morning, but I suspect there are various checks and balances it uses, whether or not needed is TBD.
Cheers.