Tablo (4th Generation) Over-the-Air [OTA] DVR

I dumped Hulu Live, bought a small antenna and switched to Tablo Version 4. Love the user interface, TV guide, and the functionality of the DVR!! Tge builtin 10db amplifier is a huge bonus! I am giving 5 stars but the only drawback is that occasionally the Tablo takes a few minutes to load. In these instances, I unplug the Tablo for 10 seconds and it lrefreshes pretty quick! I would like to see Alexa integration on Version 5!!

I cannot believe how much I am enjoying this Tablo. The first BIG thing was cutting almost $200 OUT of my budget! The next was having so.msny programs to choose from, many NOT offered by our cable provider. I am passing the word on to all of my good friends! Being able to record my favorite programs was just "icing" on the cake.

We’ve had our 4th Gen fir about 2 months and once they came out with the Roku app version 1.0.1, it had been pretty stellar for our needs, which is simply recording a few series and 2 shows that are M-F. We have an antenna in the attic and get every station that the app says we should be able to get. Easily deleted the ones we knew we would never watch, ever. The snapshots of scenes when FF or REW ate great, but unfortunately only are there when the show is completely recorded. But at least with the Roku remotes, itnis very responsive and easy to navigate and skip commercials. My ONLY complaint is that any show that is not 1080i or 720p does not come in the same picture format ad it does when viewed live directly with antenna to TV. It is squared off more with the Tablo, but picture is still excellent. Cost $98 delivered with the $5 off promo, and allowed me to save $85/mo on my cable & internet bill!!

It looks like it should work well. It has a nice-looking UI, but I've run into a lot of problems with it. Most of them have been resolved. It still needs some improvement. The UI looks nice, but I quickly found out it's not the easiest to use. I use my Library more than any other menu. To get to the recordings, I have to go up, over, down, right, OK, right, OK to get the one I want to play. Does it have to be this difficult? If you miss a step, it takes extra steps to recover. The big icons, that show a picture of your recordings, are nice but not necessary. I would prefer to have smaller icons but more content listed on the screen instead of continually having to navigate up, down, right, and left through the list. Why can't it be a simple list? It's a chore to delete watched programs. It takes several button presses and you have to pay attention to what you're doing or you'll easily delete the wrong one because they're in multiple menus. I haven't found an undelete. Scanning through commercials is difficult. Sometimes there's a preview of where you are in the recording. Sometimes, not. It's a crap shoot. I've gotten into the habit of pressing forward multiple times (10 seconds per press), estimating how far forward I need to go, then press play. It doesn't play automatically. You MUST press play each time to see where you are in the recording. That's a lot of extra button presses. If you overshoot, and go backwards, sometimes the UI stalls and you have to exit out of the menu, then go back into the menu to get it going again. Fortunately, it's only a couple extra button presses and doesn't take that long to recover. There's also control ambiguity on the transport screen. When scanning, sometimes I have to navigate up one click to get it to work. Sometimes it takes one click down to get it to work.My wife can't stand this and lets me "drive" because I'm more patient. The UI is sluggish. I have the Tablo connected to my home network via Ethernet. You would think this would take care of sluggishness problems, but it doesn't. One thing I haven't tried yet (because it's a pain), is to connect the TV to the home network with an Ethernet cable. There are several "hops" the content and control data have to jump to make all this magic work. Maybe the latency of the WiFi to the TV is bottle-neck? Once I recover and have a few beers, maybe I'll try this.

A good antenna is essential. If you don't have a strong signal, the recordings will be unreliable and frequently stall. I invested in a good antenna and it took care of most of the stalling issues. Once you have a good antenna, channel scan goes quickly.

An external HDD attached to the Tablo seemed to reduce the problems with stalling and sluggishness during playback and slow UI response. It's still not perfect.

After using it for more than a month, I find that it works OK. I'm hesitant to try anything else because of all the work it took to get this going and you can't beat the price. With Tablo I'm always able to watch what I record in spite of it's imperfections. We get a LOT of free channels (115).

Great product. Even amplifies the incoming TV signal so I get more stations. Many excellent streaming channels I had not see elsewhere are included too. I see so much new stuff I'm going to order an external hard drive so I have more space for recordings.