Me too. I turned it off also, a few weeks ago. I would pay for upgraded hardware though… and I would definitely pay for a comskip like Tivo has… something that does not require upload to their servers, and something that is not automatic.
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I am new here and just recently bought a lifetime subscription. I thought the commercial skip was part of the subscription! Now I am asked to pay an additional MONTHLY fee. I feel like this has been a bait and switch. Now I am sure this is covered legally in the TOS I agreed to, but I am nonetheless very unhappy. I had confidence in the company or I wouldn’t have purchased a lifetime sub…now this, ugh.
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No! 20.00 a year isn’t bad. It’s 19.99 higher than it’s worth. Might be worth 50 if it worked. Seems to work best during prime time. I only record sports and special events during prime time. I don’t usually wait until the next day to watch those. So it doesn’t work for me.
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Works pretty well for me (when it works). Sure, reception or other (?) mystery problems cause the skip processing to fail, but when it works, it seems to work pretty well. $20/yr.? Might be worth it.
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I believe I will sub. $20 a year is not an unreasonable price and for me the service has been fairly reliable. It’s not perfect, especially on my local ION station, but it is good enough for the time being and I expect it will get better as time goes on.
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I deactivated it a month or two ago due to the required internet upload bandwidth…
If they gave me the ability to schedule the upload time for the middle of the night, I would most likely subscribe.
Would still appreciate a bit of a discount for those with lifetime but $20 / year really isn’t too bad IMO.
FYI - That’s still something I’m lobbying for internally.
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@TabloTV I suspect you will not reveal this…I’ll ask anyways. What level of buy-in do you guys need to keep the service going? The rationale for the charge is because “cloud computing costs money” so if you do not get the buy-in from the required number of your customer base will you terminate the service?
If you terminate the service within x-period of time will people get a pro-rata refund?
I’m leaning towards “No”, it just doesn’t feel “fully baked” enough to pay for just yet? The Tablo my parents are using will require discussion in coming days?
Main issue on their Tablo re: Commercial skip is that it fails to properly process/skip on her daily soap, constantly? Commercial skip frequently skips an entire segment of the show?Other shows just seem to occasionally clip the last 5sec of a segment of a show before the commercial starts, and occasionally the skip seems to cut off the first 1-3sec after a commercial break? Catch characters mid-word? I’d asked them to email support when they mentioned this, as they’d already deleted the affected recordings before I was there to look? Not sure if they did though?
I’m not sure if I’ll subscribe. It is too expensive for something that does not work 100% (or near 100%) of the time. To me it still feels like beta (sorry tablo!).
I’d also like the show to process the CS faster than 2 hours after the show ends. Scrubbing seems to happen in less than an hour and CS seems to take two hours. Too long for $20 / year.
If CS worked near 100% and CS happen in ½ the time, then it would be worth $20 / year.
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I think they’re being too fancy with the machine learning.
A crowd-sourced method would require minimum resources and I bet it would be more accurate. You know the channel and date/time of the recording, you know when when users start/stop fast forwarding. Tablo could report back these times to detect commercials.
If 50 people in Austin, TX are watching the Tuesday 10:30PM CTS showing of The Tonight Show, and they start fast forwarding “around” 14min 18sec and stop FF “around” 15min 20sec, then that’s likely where the commercials are. When the 51st person starts watching the same show, Tablo could automatically start/stop FF starting those times.
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So Canadians now have to pay a 50% premium over the U.S.$!! And I thought the usual 25% - 30% premium was bad enough.
The worst part is … this is a Canadian company doing this to Canadians.
Wouldn’t $20USD and $25CDN$ be closer to what it should be?
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No, still seems too error prone and limited.
There really is no ‘minimum’ requirement for buy-in. Since it’s a per Tablo fee, each person is paying to keep their portion of the infrastructure running, maintained, and improved.
So if only 10 customers subscribe you can/will keep the feature running? So each person is paying $20 for a year of cloud storage/processing?
Sorry. 
The cloud infrastructure that runs the feature is paid for in USD so we had to add a bit of a buffer to account for fluctuating exchange rates.
If it makes you feel better at all (which I’m sure it doesn’t because it always sucks to pay more for stuff as a Canadian) you should be paying $6.49 CAD for monthly guide data service at today’s exchange rate but we only charge $5.99 CAD. So you’re saving some cash on that side of the fence.
That seems pretty low! For context, we’re still keeping the lights on for Cloud DVR Service which I would argue is a lot less cool than Automatic Commercial Skip. It’s not wildly popular, but it’s a super useful service for the folks who want/need it so we’re continuing to work on it.
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…and yet still not allow “night owls” adjust guide update/maintenance mode?
I like it, it’s convenient when it works, it’s the only device I have that does it, and it does it probably 75% of the time…enough so that it’s disproportionately annoying when it DOESN’T work properly…
I mean, other than commercial skip (which I will now have to pay for), my Tablo isn’t bringing that much to MY table that YoutubeTV, Hulu Live, or Sling don’t do now. Your mileage may vary, but another charge on top of the 400+ I already shelled out on Tablo (not including the hardware itself).
So, in all honesty, I probably will buy it for one year, until I decide if I even need the Tablo hooked up any more…
Lobbying for that one too! Or at least to improve the experience so it’s not as jarring when you’re watching Live TV.
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