Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Well after nine months of trying to get Tablo to work reliably my wife told me this morning that she would give up her massages, dunking donuts trips and work extra overtime at work if I would switch back to Cable. The concept of Tablo is great and when it works it's awesome. I've had the box for 9 months and during that time I've had periods where things worked very well. The problem is that it's very unreliable. There's nothing more frustrating than halfway through a show the whole thing craps out or you go to watch a show and you miss the first 10 minutes because you have to reboot the box. I've spent quite a bit of time with the support folks they are very nice and they have tried to be helpful. They've sent me debug/beta builds and I've sent them details on whats broken but we still can't get things stable. My network is solid, I get good signal strength at all the TVs and have very little WiFi interference, even on the wired portions I have issues. I'm also able to use other Roku Apps with zero problems (Netflix, Amazon, and a host of others). Support agrees that the problems are with the Tablo. Some good news is that Tablo is doing a lot to add in feature and make improvements, I may in a year try again and see how things are going (after all I've paid for the box and a lifetime of channel guide). However unless you are very technically savvy (and I feel that I am) and have time to spend debugging the system and your not looking for a solid replacement for cable then, the this might be worth the purchase, if you looking for more of a plug and play you should wait a while until things stabilize. Tablo continues to make improvements. One of my favorite is that you can fast forward through using thumbnails. It's great to find the exact spot to start watching again. They added in a live TV guide for Roku. They also seem to query there users for other feature requests, like bulk delete. I do however wish they'd spend a little more time making the box more stable. Things that Don't work Live TV on Roku 2 connected to a SD TV (app crashes) - I reported this a while back and Tablo has given me a couple test builds to try to resolve the problem. The frustrating part about this is that I found a work around on the Forums, it's odd that Support was not aware of the work around. You can plug your Roku into an HD TV and set it up for 720, then move back to your SD TV. You obviously need a HD TV to make this work and when you move back the picture quality isn't very good. (Because your running 720 on an SD TV). Another workaround, and I find this one strange is I go to another TV or to my PC and record the show. I then go to my SD TV and watch the recording. It works, not sure why. If it can stream a recording why can't it stream live TV? Fast Forward/Rewind When this works it's awesome, but like many other users I run into the same problem where it locks up. Then you sit there pressing every button frantically trying to get it to respond. It will on occasion crash. Live TV stuck in a loop This used to happen on channels with a weak signal, however now even on a strong signal there are times where the box just plays the same 10-30 second loop over and over. You'll need to reset the box to clear this one up. Error Weak Signal This will sometimes happen on a station with a strong signal. The fix to this is to go into your settings (from a PC), you'll notice under the remote click box some router port errors, if you uncheck the remote access and then re-enable that will fix the problem. If you leave this box unchecked you won't be able to remote access the Tablo but you won't get the error. If you do re-enable it you'll get the error again but not right away. Slow Response/ Multi steps needed. This isn't really a problem it's just how things work but it, it's not like cable where you click up/down channel. It takes many clicks when you first start to get to a stations. 1 click to wake Roku, click over to tablo app, click app, wait for it to load, click live tv, wait for schedule to load, click up/down to find station, click on station, wait for popup dialog, click watch, wait for stream to start. I'm not sure Tablo can do a lot to change this but would be nice if they could speed it up. For example when the dialog box pops up, show the watch button first so folks can click on that, load the other buttons after. Overall, I really would like to cut my cable, and I think in the not so distant future that will truly be possible. The concept of Tablo is great but my recommendation is to wait until they are able to get things a little more solid. I hope this was useful, and hope to rejoin my fellow cable cutters in the future.