Tablo
I was so close to returning Tablo 4 tuner version until I read some very insightful comments in the Tablo community. I know love this app and it fills a huge need to truly get off cable or stream services that force you to pay a minimum of $600/year. Here are my overall conclusions and a few suggestions:
Reasons to keep Tablo:
- Zero ongoing fees unlike HDHomeRun that charges a monthly/annual fee and will even charge if you have appletv.
- You get 50 hours of free HD recording. Other products/providers always charge recurring fees
- If you are really cutting the cord, you need a way to broadcast your antenna signal throughout your home unless you only have a few TVs that have cable cords to each TV and you don’t need a DVR. I have 9 TVs.
- Tablo does NOT require a ethernet cable. You can use WIFI to connect to the internet. The quality of the Tablo TV signal is extremely good and have not experienced any signal glitches yet. I do have a high speed 1 gig internet connection.
- Antenna quality makes a huge difference. I am in the Sunnyvale, CA location and finally settled on ForLovv antenna on Amazon for $55 and I mounted it on my roof chimney. I am receiving ~176 stations (vs 60 when mounted indoors); However, I only care about Fox, ABC, NBC & CBS for National content & Live sports.
- I initially found Tablo to be extremely buggy and unstable. The quality of your signal is the key to stability. Once I received a quality signal that was connected to Tablo, the app is 100% stable.
Recommendations:
- At least based on my location in Sunnyvale, I could NOT receive all of the key stations (ABC, FOX, CBS & NBC) when the antenna was mounted internally. Once mounted on your roof, It doubles or triples your stations and I was able to receive all of the big 4 channels clearly.
- You have to be very careful if you try to use amplifiers for your TV signals. From all the community comments as well as my experiences, amplifers don’t work consistently and mess up the TV signal. If you amplify a poor signal, it makes it even worse. My longest cable length was about 40 ft.
- From your roof antenna, connect the antenna coax cable directly to Tablo, If you add any intermediate cables, your TV signals may be affected and then causes Tablo app to have issues.
- Spend the money and buy a good coax splitter ($10) and a shorter 1-3 foot high quality coax cable when connecting to Tablo.
- I was unable to get the favorites to load each time I entered the app. I also found the app a bit unstable whenever I tried to use it. App would crash or display the wrong channels. The workaround is to go into the Tablo app setting/guide and check mark only the channels you want to see. If you rescan the channels quarterly, you may have to select your favorite stations again. I only selected 12 stations in total.
Future Possibilities:
- My hope in cable/streaming services is to not pay for any local stations especially when I need to watch sporting events. ROKU does have local stations but they will not broadcast nationally televised content or sports. I really think local news is a nice to have and national content is far more important.
- Please add Tablo app to AppleTV. My guess is that apple is making it difficult or charging fees to do this. I have to use ROKU to use Tablo. A decent workaround for appleTV users but its annoying.
- I don’t want to pay for 100+ stations when I only watch 10. I hope that Tablo eventually adds individual stations that we can all select 1 by 1. I would likely pay for TNT, ESPN 1&2, Food Network, AMC, CNBC, Hallmark, CNN, cooking channel & CNBC. I am not sure what is holding the industry back from doing this but I am sure there are crazy limitations that is forcing providers to bundle channels and charge a ton.
- Many regions have local sports content for NBA, NFL, etc that you can only get by paying for cable or streaming services like Hulu Live, DirecTV, Youtube TV, Sling, etc. I hope those stations can be purchased individually in the future.