Tablo OTA DVR

After thinking about it for a long time, then buying an indoor TV antenna that worked fairly well, I decided to cut the cord and abandon cable TV, replacing it with a system for receiving over the air (OTA) broadcasts and recording them on a digital video recorder (DVR). I picked Tablo over some of the other options because it seemed to offer a little more versatility than Tivo and was still pretty advanced and reliable. I ordered it from Best Buy and got it this week. At $200 it isn’t a horrible price up front, but there are other costs associated with it. One is they charge $5 per month for the programming guide which not only tells you what programs are coming up, but also helps you record them, record a series of shows, customize the start and stop times, etc. It seems essential to have the guide. You can also pay $50 per year for the guide or a one-time fee of $150 for lifetime guide support. I’m leaning towards doing the 1-year guide and if it works out and I keep using it, getting the lifetime. I don’t have to decide right away because it comes with the first month guide for free.

Also the Tablo does not connect to your TV’s HDMI port like a Tivo. Instead it connects to your home computer network via ethernet or wifi and you can watch shows on your phones or tablets via apps, cast shows to your TV via those devices, or gets apps for your TV. Unfortunately, Tablo seems mostly locked out of the TV app market so you have to buy a Roku, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire TV stick or box to have the apps and then play the shows on the TV.

I got my box in a couple of days. It is pretty small, 5 inches square and less than 2 inches tall. It has 64 GB of memory built in so you don’t have to hook up a hard drive immediately, but you can hook up a portable USB hard drive, which I did eventually using an extra 320 GB hard drive I had lying around (I have a 2 TB drive hooked up to my cable box now, so that will be available in a couple of weeks). I was getting pretty good reception in the bay window in the back of my house which points towards Atlanta, so to start with I just plugged in the antenna and power to the Tablo. Then on my iPad I downloaded the Tablo app. It didn’t find a Tablo connected to my wifi network because it wasn’t set up yet, but the Tablo was broadcasting its own wifi network that I could have the iPad connect to. Then it asked me for my wifi password and we were off to the races. Once connected to wifi, I could use the app, download the program guide and updates, etc. First, again using the iPad app, I had it scan for broadcast channels. There are a bunch of them! And they are almost all worthless junk of home shopping, foreign language programming, religious channels, and filler. However, there are also the big 4 networks, Peachtree TV, the CW channel, and two PBS stations. Channel 8 is on Stone Mountain which is the opposite direction of all the other stations, so I can either get it clearly or all of the other channels, so I may have to rely on Channel 30 for PBS. Getting good reception is absolutely critical to the whole thing and the hardest thing to achieve. The app shows signal strength for each channel and 5 green circles is the best. 3 yellow circles is pretty bad and a red circle probably won’t even tune in. There are no 2 or 4 circle ratings, which is unfortunate because sometimes even with 5 green circles, you get glitches in the signal (so it seems like that should be 4). Once I narrowed it down to those 8 channels, it showed me a grid of icons for different shows, not sorted by time or channel. That’s kind of a neat approach and the whole app is pretty slick like that, making itself seem more like a streaming service like Vudu than a wonky do it yourself recording effort.

However, it is not exactly speedy. First, once you start the app, it takes 30 seconds or so for the Tablo to boot or show up on the screen. Even with so few channels I was interested in, it still takes a while for the channel guide to load (and trying to advance through the day is pretty slow because the guide doesn’t seen to be preloaded and can’t go past 24 hours apparently) and if you want to watch live TV, it takes at least 15 seconds to tune a channel, buffer the broadcast, and start showing. It isn’t good for channel surfing. I set it up to record a show at the next half hour, which turned out to be Jeopardy. But now that it had become self aware, it realized that it needed some firmware updates, so it had to download those and reboot a couple of times, which didn’t take but a few minutes. The reception is perfect. Everything except Channel 8 had come in at maximum strength. I could easily watch shows on the iPad or on my phone after downloading the Android version of the app. The strength of the wifi signal was strong enough that I could walk all over the house without the show ever breaking up. Something I had read said there was not a 30-second skip for commercials, but the iPad app definitely has that available (it may depend on which platform the app is running, so iOS has it anyway). Here’s a screenshot I took later from the iPad:

It was more challenging getting the TVs on board. My back room TV is a 42-inch Toshiba HDTV whose only “smart” function is that it has Chromecast built in. I have been able to cast shows from my phone’s Netflix app to the TV pretty easily, but I was not seeing the Chromecast icon in the Tablo app. This may be because the TV wasn’t on. Once the TV was on, the icon appeared and I could cast to the TV. With the TV remote I can pause a broadcast, but once I was casting in the app I couldn’t stop the connection. If I clicked the Chromecast icon again, the app quit suddenly (but the show kept playing). Something I read said you could only cast to TV using an Android tablet, not a phone, so maybe this isn’t entirely implemented yet. It was the only thing so far that didn’t work well, but it is pretty critical because casting is the only way I have of getting a signal to that TV (unless I buy a Roku or something).

My main TV does not do Chromecast, but the HiSense comes with the usual apps including one for Amazon, but it is just to watch Amazon Prime videos, not load Amazon apps (of which Tablo is one). There is no Tablo app built in to the TV and I don’t think you can add apps. My Samsung DVD player which is connected to that TV also has apps, but again, no Tablo, not even to download. The TV does come with “Anyview Cast” which is supposed to let you cast from your phone, laptop, etc. to the TV. Not sure how this works. I think I got it to work on my laptop once, but it just mirrors the laptop screen, which is less than HD, so the results blown up don’t look that good. I can connect the TV as an external monitor to the laptop via HDMI, which looks great, but it is pretty clumsy having a cord and setting that up every time. The iPad only seems to want to cast using Apple TV. There was an iPad app that could do Anyview casting, but I didn’t want to pay for something that might not work. So I probably need to get a Roku which seems to be what most people use with Tablo and their TV. The cheap Roku Express ($30) may not work, meaning I might have to get a more expensive Roku Stick ($50) or Stick+ ($50, but usually $70). The Stick+ supports UHD, even though the Tablo is only HD, but if I’m going to have Roku and cut cords, maybe using the Roku for Hulu or something could use the UHD capability (the TV’s native Netflix app is UHD, but not its Vudu app, and it doesn’t have Hulu at all). With the 5% rewards for putting the Tablo on my Best Buy credit card, I could get $10 off the Roku, plus I have another $5 in rewards coming with my next credit card statement. In the meantime, I still have cable until March 12, so this isn’t pressing. To keep things cheap, I could get the Amazon Fire TV stick for $30 (normally $40 and, like the Roku Express, not UHD) and it is available at Best Buy too so I can use the rewards to get it down to $15. Amazon makes a UHD version of the Fire TV, but people are saying it doesn’t get along with the Tablo app, so that’s not a good choice at the moment. Walmart sells a box called a Xiaomi Mi Box which is UHD and only $69 ($58 on sale).

So everything was working pretty well. I hooked up my 320 GB external drive so I wouldn’t have to worry about managing the 64 GB of built-in storage on the Tablo. You can record at different resolutions. If you were only going to watch shows on a phone, you wouldn’t need much resolution, but for a bigger screen, you want full resolution. Sort of. Most HD channels broadcast in 720p or 1080i (never more than that). By default the Tablo records at 720p, but also offers 1080i and 1080p. Ideally, it would record 720p channels at 720p and 1080i channels at 1080i, but that isn’t a choice. Instead, if you record at 1080i, it will upscale the 720p picture to 1080, but throw away every other frame that 720p offers. So the only way to get the best of everything is to always record at 1080p, but the bandwidth for that is 10 Mbps, which means a 1-hour show is 4.5 GB. My 320 GB hard drive can only hold 66 hours of TV at 1080p. At 720p, it can hold twice that. For now I picked 1080i, which will give me 83 hours. For most shows, I won’t store them long term, so by telling it to keep only the 5 most recent shows, it should manage itself pretty well. If you don’t already have a hard drive that you can erase and use, buying one for $60 or so would be another expense.

The other thing is the wifi bandwidth. I have a 802.11n router, which is capable of maybe 70 Mbps, but realistically on my 75 Mbps internet connection, I see about 20 Mbps on my living room laptop over wifi a couple of rooms away from the router. My worry is that if the Tablo has to transmit a show to my router and then to my computer, that would double the wifi usage using too much of the available wifi bandwidth. So it might work better to have the Tablo connected directly to the router with ethernet so that wifi is only being used from the router to the laptop (or TV). I even thought about possibly having AT&T run the internet to where the living room TV is now so all of that can use a direct connection, but with TV reception better at the back of the house, maybe that’s where I want to keep the router.

I wound up moving the Tablo closer to the router so I connect it via an ethernet cable, which meant getting maybe a little worse reception from the antenna, however, by putting the antenna in the window, I am back to max strength on all channels except 8. Even though the Tablo isn’t using much internet bandwidth, I think household wifi bandwidth could be a real issue especially with families where several people might be using the network at the same time. However for me it works out fine. If I had to upgrade my wifi router to something heavier duty that could easily be another $100. Watching TV on the iPad is kind of neat, but not something I will probably do that often (you can also set up the Tablo to allow logging in remotely and watching your shows from elsewhere on the internet).

In terms of cost, I am able to drop cable television which was costing about $35 per month, but of that $35, only $7 (recently went up to $8) was for local channels and I will be paying about $4 for the program guide. So in some ways, I am saving very little money. But by dropping cable altogether, I am saving about $30 per month, meaning it should pay for itself in a year.