A working home network and tablo with stored recordings should NOT require “phone home to mothership” to play said recordings.
For that matter, tuning local OTA channels should also be possible without the “backend servers” being up.
I understand the “Home Screen” content could be missing (so if the backend isn’t up, then put a placeholder page there “Temporary Connection Failure to Tablo Servers…”).
It has to happen tablo. This “feature” (requiring connection to backend for EVERYTHING) is going to kill off your loyal users.
I’m the new guy, 5 days in, and I am really on the fence about just exercising my option and returning the G4 I am trying to like!
I still have my cable TV setup. When I want to watch some teevee I DON’T want to be an IT guy and do a lot of fiddling around. I just want to watch some damned teevee!
Tablo: get it together. You have (had) a lot of momentum in a great direction, but you are going adrift now and seemingly without any power left!
It sounds like the Rokus aren’t handling these outages very well. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper/faster/easier to try a $20 Walmart 4k ONN box? I’m assuming they’ll work to change how the Roku reacts to outages as they have with the android/firestick over the past few months.
My reasoning? Up until recently, my GoogleTV, AndroidTV, and Firesticks would also be useless during these outages. I’m impressed with how quickly they were able to incorporate a feature to access recordings. It could be better – the inability to watch OTA during these times being the biggest failure – but with each app and fw update, the Tablo has improved.
I have a Roku Ultra 4K+, it was giving me a fit on the wireless. I noticed it has a very weak wireless card in it. I had to rearrange my access points within my home to get better signal.
Maybe it’s better to give up on the Gen4 and find a legacy Tablo on eBay or similar if you can’t buy a new one. It’s probably worth the $5/month for the stability.
Might be worth a shot, that’s for sure. Still throwing extra money at the problem, but they do have a few benefits.
I wonder how much these servers outages will affect them if person were to do a fw update to use the same TabloTV software the 4th gens use. Or how long they’ll work on their “last” fw update…
IDK… I wouldn’t mind trying one myself, but I worry about products that are being phased out. Who knows how long they’ll continue to support these older devices!
I don’t mind if the Tablo device and apps use cloud services to enhance the experience: splashy program icons, detailed guides, content search, and so on.
But I don’t want the Tablo device or app to fail when the cloud service is unavailable for any reason. They should gracefully fallback to local-only operation: simple program icons, basic OTA guides, disabled search, …
I agree, local operation should be affected by an issue outside of your network.
PLEX was like that at one time. Couldn’t watch anything in your local library if you weren’t connected to their site.
They eventually added a setting you could select in the app so you did not have to connect to their site.
I would be happy… if it only gave me live OTA TV during a server outage. Let me flip through the channels like I did back in the 80s and 90s.
I don’t even want the guide during this time. While we are at it… bring back the TV Guide channel too.
Wonder how many hours I’ve spent in my life time waiting for that thing to spin? Then you miss it. and gotta watch it again.
Perhaps that’s why I haven’t noticed. I have the OG Tablo. With that said I did have a server issue before but that ws self inflicted. Tablo does(or at least used to) use a shared Amazon cloud infrastructure. I blocked a malware site that happened to be using the same infrastructure and shut down my Tablo. If you have any filters or are using a filtering service it’s worth checking part of the Tablo servers aren’t blocked somehow.
I’ve seen people trying to replicate the old school TV viewing experience. I even did that myself to some degree. I replicated my favorite TV viewing block on Plex by creating a huge playlist I hit shuffle on. Plex also has an option to show random movie trailers before you play a movie to replicate a “real” movie theater experience.
It would be cool if Tablo could preload a tuner with the current content one channel above and below the currently viewed content for a “fast flip mode”. Assuming of course the tuners are unused. I would use that feature to browse channels.
