Oh look, its retired engineer seizing the opportunity to offer unsolicited advice on how Tablo should manage their employees and product development, slinging half baked insults and otherwise ranting to an uninterested audience.
In a thread about DVRs.
Good to see we’re staying on topic.
For probably over 10 years, I was locked in with Dish Network, mostly because it was my first experience with DVR, and I absolutely liked the idea of being able to record tv shows and fast forward through the commercials. I don’t really have any experience with any other DVRs other than with DISH, but I have since realized they really got it right the first time because their feature set really didn’t change much over those 10 years. I do realize with their Hopper, it is much better, but I just wasn’t willing to pay the extra cost that they were asking to upgrade, so I switched to Tablo. That has been a big eye opener for me, and I kind of wish I had shopped around more before switching to Tablo. I think at this point, I wish I had switched to Tivo, even though there is more cost. I am still saving a ton by switching from Dish, but the quality of features going from DISH to Tablo was just to big of a jump. I wanted to save money, but I wasn’t that desperate. On average, I was probably paying around $50 per month for a year without having to pay for the DVR receiver. Even though I cringe at paying around $13 per month for the Tivo service, I just think Tablo has alot of catching up to do, and I see alot of resources being pumped into trying to make Tablo work on alot of different devices, and so there feature set is never going to be close to something like Tivo. Another thing I see with Tablo is the quality assurance with their releases is very problematic, where sometimes they take a step forward, and then a step backwards. That kind of stuff drives me nuts. I never saw that with Dish and probably wouldn’t with Tivo. Taking everything into consideration, and only saving 5-10 bucks per month by going with Tablo just doesn’t seem to be worth it. After 6 months of cutting the cord and going with Tablo, I am just being honest with my latest assessment, where I was mostly looking for a good solution for the DVR, not necessarily a solution that works on multiple portable devices.
Like you, @oldmike and @shalone, I am likely going to go with a Tivo in Florida. Tablo is working quite well these days here in Buffalo, but I despise auto-pushed unsolicited updates which break working equipment or fix one thing but break another. When I turn on Tablo and something which worked properly yesterday no longer works, (and may take 8 months to fix) I too, like @shalone, will start looking at other options.
The “best DVR” in the final analysis may not have all the bells and whistles, but instead makes truly dependable recordings, plays them back reliably, and isn’t, after 2 years on the market, still struggling with basic issues.
For many monthes Tablo delberately kept 2 channel apps alive for Roku, the ‘legacy’ app remaining unmodified.
Users thus had an option to install either or both, and thus choose to avoid new bugs should they arise.
A method like this no longer is being employed, but would entirely avoid the element of “surprise” I am referring to.
@shalone says it drives him crazy when updates break things and I utterly agree. This would be a way to allow us some ability to control our Tablo destiny using Roku, a badly needed remedy. Waking up to morning coffee and treadmill only to find new Tablo problems is what causes these angry rants.
The creation of new bugs by Tablo developers, regardless of auto or manual update, is quite a spectacle to behold and endure. Why not do it ONCE correctly rather than adding drama with each update? A 2 year old product with some early adopter 2 year users deserve basic functions which work correctly.
Retired,
I recall a few days ago where you posted something weird that happened on your phone and someone else posted their screenshot from the same actions that did not show the problem you had. Maybe some of your problems are because you don’t keep your software up to date?
Thanks for your suggestion.
In the case of iOS devices, the apps are automatically updated, with updates to iOS itself done only after some time has elapsed to see if any major new issues have been reported. In this case all software updates including iOS 9.2 are installed.
Not Tablo’s fault that the iOS app installs updates automatically. The extra phantom recording icons, currently 3, sometimes as many as 5, are clearly Tablo bug(s).
Update - Just deleted, reinstalled iPhone Tablo app, rebooted phone, and began using Tablo. Screen problem with landscape mode now fixed !! Phantom recordings still show up (on Nexus as well as iPhone but not on Roku since latest Roku channel app update a few days ago). Progress!
In one of my previous software development companies I worked for, they were really big into developing a product that was portable across multiple servers, databases, and clients, and even though that seemed great at the time, it practically killed the company because it required an incredible amount of resources to make everything portable and compatible. Besides that, their products were buggy. The biggest gotcha was when we wanted to add a feature, we then had to make that feature work on several different code bases; which, seemed to take take longer to provide new features. Even though Tablo is a single box, they are trying to support many different clients, and that can require major resources to keep up with all the clients when a new feature is developed and released. One of the main reasons I am bailing is I know first hand that taking that same approach will take them much longer to produce the features that I want that are already in competing products. Do I have to wait a year, 2 years, 3 years for a basic feature that has been in other DVR products for many years? Meanwhile, other competitors are leap frogging them. Luckily for Tablo, that have customers that don’t know any better, and are willing to settle for less, deal with buggy software, and are incredibly patient in waiting for features that might take years.
The software isn’t buggy at all in my experience on Android TV, and I don’t think I am missing out on features already available on other products at a comparable price point. Can you explain? The only features I would like are more Android TV integrations (which aren’t available on any other OTA DVR on Android TV) and automatic commercial skipping (awesome idea, but not worth 3x the sub fee for me, considering I usually use my Hulu account if I want to watch a recording commercial-free).
Thank you for updating us about your iOS problem in a thread about DVRs.
Yes an iOS problem I don’t have on any of my Apple devices.
Thankfully, neither do I any longer. As I said, “Progress”!
GBPVR. I used it in server mode sort of like the way Tablo works. I had 2 clear QAM tuners and a analog component video recorder that was hooked up to a cable box. Each of the TVs had a popcorn hour box connected to it. I had zero loss of picture quality, 5.1 sound, automatic commercial skipping and the ability to archive movies off of pay TV stations like HBO in HD.
I retired the system last June when Time Warner turned off clear QAM. My computer running the system was showing its age and I did not have energy rebuild it. The loss of QAM just was the final nail in the coffin.
I really like the simplicity of the Tablo. My goal is just have one device (Apple TV 4) hooked up to each TV and that gives access to all services including local OTA with Tablo.
Were you watching live? Watching recording should be just as fast using FF.
I still have 2 Panny VCR’s. I can save you $750 for each one 
Hands down SageTV, especially after the digital TV conversion. They came out with three revs of their hardware set top boxes of which I have HD100 and HD200. This made a good product a great one because it made configuration and usage pretty danged simple. Plus the set top boxes did all the heavy lifting of decoding the HD signal so you could use relatively cheap hardware to run the Sage server. SageTV was also very extensible. Someone wrote a ComSkip extension that is a thing of wonder. I’m glad to hear Jeff Kardatzke, CEO of SageTV was able to convince Google to open source SageTV. My hope is this will initiate some real innovation of a once great, but a bit stale product.