Tablo TV 4th Gen 2-Tuner Over-The-Air (OTA) DVR - Watch, Pause & Record Live Television, News, Sports & Movies Throughout Your Home Over Wi-Fi - Pairs w/Any TV Antenna - No Subscriptions

I've been recording broadcast TV on my own for years now. Back in the day, before streamers were available, I built my own computer, bought some network tuners, installed and setup (painfully) TV receiving and recording software. Life is so much easier when it comes to TV thanks to Tablo! I'm wondering if the negatives reviews are valid. I think not, actually. Why am I doubtful? Because there's more to watching and recording TV than just hooking up your Tablo. I've had my Tablo for 2 years now and I love it. It's the easiest and most reliable over the air system I've ever had. What's really cool is that I can watch the same shows on all my TVs at the same time. So, only one tuner is actually used when streaming to TVs that are watching the same broadcast. Nice on football Sunday at our house, we have 3 TVs watching the same game at the same time. I've also recommended Tablo to some friends, even set them up at their houses. They've had them for a year now and are also happy with Tablo and now recommend them to their family and friends. That's quite a positive statement, right? It's not completely without issues but none are major. If you have issues with Tablo, before blaming Tablo, heck, even before you buy one, check the following 1. Where are you TV broadcast towers located? You can use TV Fool (tvfool.com). You enter your address and it will display a map with tower locations, distance, power output etc. If you are using an indoor antenna you will likely only be able to access the stations with a green background. Note the distance from your house too, the farther way the station is the harder it will be to receive. Also note the direction from your house. If (like me) not al of your towers are in the same direction, you might have issues with some of them even if they are the same distance from your house. If you can, test your antenna at different locations facing the towers 2. Run a speed test on your phone from each of your TVs that you want to stream over the air broadcasts to. Run a speed on your phone from windows or areas in your house that have the best "line of sight" to the towers broadcasting to you. Those should be the likely places you'll test reception for your antenna. If any location reads less than 20 megabits per second you'll need to improve your router or add some in key locations in your house. You really want to have ample bandwidth for your TV signal to stream to your TV. It needs quite a bit to stream a 1080i stream from your Tablo to your TV. Each TV in use simultaneosly needs addition bandwidth, so think that 40 mps as a minimum for two TVs that are being watched at the same time. 3. Weather. Weather plays a HUGE role in how well TV signals will reach your house. If it's raining, snowing or windy your signal will degrade and cause pixelation,a dropped signal, or a spinning wheel on your TV. Take note of the weather if you have some issues receiving a live stream or a stream that was recorded during inclement weather. We have very windy days where I live and TV isn't great on those days. No issues when the weather isn't windy, raining or snowing. Don't blame Tablo if "sometimes" it doesn't work will and those "sometimes" are on bad weather days. Try an antenna alone in bad weather, if you can test it for a few weeks before hooking up your Tablo you might have some good history to compare with. 4. Software glitches or bugs. All software has it. Every once in awhile, you probably need to restart a phone or computer when it goes wonky. Tablo is no different. Restarting your Tablo from time to time will cure issues. I also restart my streaming device (TV or Firestick routinely. I find that they perform better after a restart. So restart both your Tablo and your streaming device when there are issues (every day even better!) Issues - 1. From time to time when watching something from my Tablo the screen goes black. Then a few seconds later it comes back on. Then all is well, maybe I should restart more often to avoid this, maybe it can't be avoided. It's weird. 2. Sometimes, when launching Tablo, it'll try to continue playing what was last watched. That is, I terminated a viewing while watching a live show. Tablo tries to re-establish that same show in flight but it's gone. You have to select "cancel" to get back to the main menu. It's not intuitive, but that's what I do. 3. If I'm watching something live and recordings commence that use all tuners the recordings win and I'm shown a message "No tuner available". I guess that's good so the recordings are made but it's still annoying. I have no solution to offer, actually so I guess I'm just compaining. 4. Sync. When watching the same show at the same time on multiple TVs. As much as I like having the same football show on all my TVs at the same time, for whatever reason, they aren't in sync. One will be ahead of another. I can pause the fastest for a few moments until it's pretty much in sync but that's a first world problem that I'm not happy with. Sometimes, there's as much as a 2 second lag between TVs. That doesn't sound like much but it is when there's a touchdown or an interception and people in the other room scream out. 5. Tablo customer support - Network password. I had issues getting my Tablo to connect to my network. Tablo's customer support was very bad. They respond via email at 3:00 to 4:00 AM EST. I suppose that means they are on the other side of the world. They aren't knowledgeable. When all their recommendations failed, they wanted me to film myself and send them the video so they could review. That was BS, for sure. I mean, even if I did that my personal email won't send a file that large. And, I was doing all the steps properly so I saw no reason to film myself. I suppose someone would have to film me setting up my Tablo since it is setup from my phone. That's how it works. Anyway, I came to discover that I had an apostrophe in my network password and Tablo won't connect to Wifi if there's an apostrophe. Once I changed my home network password to not include an apostrophe it worked fine. As a former (long time ago) programmer I'm aware of apostrophe issues in strings of characters. All programmmers are, at least all except for the programmers who work at Tablo, apparantly. Anyway, the apostrophe should not have been an issue, it just needed one or two more lines of code to handle it. Tablo support should have been aware of the issue and been able to troubleshoot with a simple question, they didn't. Sorry for the rant, but i purchased an additional Tablo thinking that my unit was defective, then when the 2nd couldn't connect either I purchased a third. Then I figured out the apostrophe issue and returned the 2nd and third unis for full refund. Not good for me, Tablo or Amazon. All in all, it's great unit. If you try one I hope you enjoy it too! Wrap up. I do love my Tablo. It's not plug and play. You'll need to make sure you have adequate Wifi in your house and your antennas in a good spot and can receive stations. Also, even if you have 1 gigabit or more internet speed that's pretty much meaningless when it comes to watching broadcast TV. The only things your Tablo uses the internet for is to get guide data and send back what it is that you're watching. The broadcast comes over the air, not the internet and streaming of shows from Tablo to your TVs is your home router's job. If you've an old slow router get a new one. Your internet provider (Fios, Spectrum, whatever) will likely give you one for free just to keep your business. At least where I live, nobody ever gets a router upgrade without asking. Try it, you just might like it. If it doesn't work for you and you're a Prime customer send it back - no harm, no foul! I think it works for most people and the issues reported by some here just might not be Tablo's issue at all.

The idea of a modern equivalent to the tivo is great. And if this product did what it advertises, it would be amazing. It does not, and it just kinda sucks. Before I get into specifics, let me note I live in an area with very strong OTA TV signal, and have an excellent antenna that has worked flawlessly with my prior TV. My new TV does not feature OTA live TV pause, hence buying the Tablo. I also have fiber intent with MESH WiFi. Installation should be pretty straightforward...but it is not. I spent nearly two hours staring at constant error messages. The setup is through your phone, and when it cannot find the Tablo, or it stops responding, you start over. This was incredibly frustrating. Again note I have an excellent internet and WiFi. Once installed, the problems did not stop. To use on your TV you must use an app, there is no direct plug to the TV etc. I think if there were it would get rid of 90% of the problems. The app for Fire TV is incredibly slow. It often will not load at all. It takes more than 60 seconds to load, then at least that much time more to get info. App loading speeds have nothing to do with connection, it is just a really large clunky app. Once loaded I often get error messages. These just randomly pop up and the app has to reload. App usage is extremely poor. It is extremely slow to respond. Often fails and the system just reboots. While watching life tV it will briefly display an error message before rebooting. It has also failed during recording multiple times. My primary desire was to pause life TV. When you hit pause it takes 5-10 seconds to pause. that brief period is not recorded and is lost. you can rewind, though it will only rewind in preset increments, again needing 5-10 seconds to rewind an equal amount time. The net result is that to go back and watch the previous play in your game takes roughly a minute, and you will lose what happens in that minute on live tv. You are stuck with a display bar of where you are until you get back to live tv, which will take another 5-10 seconds to load or simply cause the device to reboot. Unfortunatley this device fails at every possible level. It does not do anything it promises well, or sometimes at all.