Here’s one of my biggest issues with watching TV with my Tablo. There is too much dead air when navigating. I use my Rokus most so that’s the perspective I am sharing right now. For those used to channel surfing, going from channel to channel on a Tablo via Roko creates a lot of dead air because basically it just takes too darn long to tune in a new channel. I know I had posted something similar before but if there was a way to hang onto the stream while tuning in another channel or something to that effect it could basically more closely simulate changing channels. Just a thought.
Not an exact solution but you could split your OTA ANTENNA, one cable directly to your HDTV and another cable to your Tablo.
This will allow you to watch Live TV directly on your HDTV and also to channel surf quickly. Plus video quality is better with the use of the HDTV tuner.
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As I understand it, every time you initially access an OTA channel, Tablo needs to transcode the signal (which as you know is like watching paint dry). I do not think there is much possibility of speeding up that process. However, once you have accessed a channel, if you channel surf to a new channel, the return to the first channel is very quick.
but if it did that in the background while it still streamed the current channel and then switched… I dunno this is just a thought. It’s just a very long time in today’s digital world. Kinda reminds me of the TV commercials showing AOL dial-up buffering when broadband connections started becoming popular. 
As @jdoe has explained it, the time it takes to change channel is a process that likely will not be reduced in time. Hence, my solution.
I don’t see any point in that because I would not be able to pause live TV which is basically part of the reason I have a Tablo to begin with. I find it hard to believe this is not possible. I know it’s somewhat different but I have used SageTV, Beyond TV etc etc over the years and I have never seen something that take quite this long to tune a channel. If there is a major drawback at all to my Tablo purchase it is that at this point not to say I am unhappy but nothing is perfect of course.
These other solutions you speak of were just capturing the raw MPEG2 video hence the speed. The Tablo has to transcode the MPEG2 video to h.264 video and then serve it up, hence the delay.
I have my antenna split. The only downside is that you can’t browse the guide directly on the TV. I end up with my phone in one hand and the remote in the other. Did I mention that pulling up the guide on Android makes paint drying look fast?
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