Tablo Reviews

Despite multiple promises from the company that an Apple TV app is on the way, it is still without one. I have had the new this app since last July or August and cannot even use it. I have contacted support multiple times requesting to know a date when Tablo will be released and even requested a refund for the device if Tablo isn’t going to be available soon but they did not respond to that. If you are using Apple TV, I highly recommend not purchasing a this app and looking at other devices. As a long term legacy this app user, I am very disappointed in the support I have received with this new device.

Fairly simple, the purpose of app is to watch over the air tv on iPhone. Problem is, it just doesn’t work. If what you are wanting to watch is under the “home” tab, then all appears to work great. But unfortunately if you want to watch something from the “live” tab, all you get is “item not found”. Tablo is horrible and the device itself is not much better. Will be returning the this app device as well.

Update. Less than 1 star. Spent over 3 hours with their “technical support”. Their only solution is “reboot”. Uninstall and reinstall. That didn’t work? Uh, uninstall and reinstall something else. That didn’t work? Uh, send me a screenshot. Oh wait, the support platform doesn’t allow files. Let’s move this to email, and I guess you can imagine how fast that level of support will be. This company really has some work to do l, but there is great potential for it.

I had hoped the majority of reviews were not as bad as they said but sadly they are true. I had high hopes for this but it took 30-40 minutes to get the device to start working. I had to reset it many many times because it kept freezing up partway through the set up. After it finally completed the setup I was able to connect it to the TV for a few minutes then when I came back after walking away it was disconnected and said it no longer could see it on the network. It was still connected on my phone though for a short while and then it also disconnected. At that point i figured I had wasted enough time, boxed it up, and will return it tomorrow. Maybe one day they will get it to work properly.

Since adding this app to my residence it interferes with my Wi-Fi, interferes with utilizing my phone and dropped without notice hour and a half into watching TV on the second day, TV is fine the Internet was fine but this app is not living up to its type.

Their idea of tech-support is an AI bought that doesn’t understand basic communications, also the AI bought often limits your responses so you cannot ask a question if you don’t understand something
So this is not a device that is human friendly.
I think it is just another way to get into peoples homes to gather information. Much like the new smart TVs if you don’t want to use the open “voice services” why must one accept it. Because they wanna listen when they want to listen.

There are a ton of problems with this half-baked version of Tablo .

-Setup over wifi didn’t work

-After I do a channel scan and select the channels that I want to be displayed, all the extra channels are still displayed but there is no show information populated for those channels

-If you are recording a show (like a football game), you cannot start from the beginning while the show is still recording. When you select the recording, the playback starts from the current time. Further, there is not the option to navigate back to the beginning of the recording.

-Apple TV app isn’t ready yet, no mirroring available as a temporary work around.

I should have seen this coming. I have been using the original this app quad tuner since it was first released about a decade ago. That app got better over time but still had some pretty major bugs while watching a time shifted football game like the scenario I described above. I naively expected the new app to be better, but it’s a step back. Fool me twice, shame on me. I think it’s time to move on from this app.

I have been a this app subscriber for almost 5 years and everything was working almost perfect until the last update to the legacy app. I bought the new this app white thinking it would solve my problems but unfortunately it didn’t. It just brought more frustration. The quality of the image is excellent but it takes forever to stream and in most cases it freezes. Neither could I record complete shows. It just records four small fragments of 4 minutes each. You can’t program to record a show for the next day or even for the next four hours, Tablo gives you a message, “program was not found.” I really wanted this app to work because I am very familiar with it. I will wait a couple of weeks hoping that they fix Tablo , if not I will donate it to Salvation Army and I will move to a different company. Sorry.

App version: 1.4.3 iPad
Device: this app 4th gen two tuner
Firmware: 2.2.52

I scheduled a recorded event about a week ago. The event was scheduled to start at 12pm and end at 2pm. Recording options were set to extend the event by 30 minutes.

I tried to start watching the event at approximately 2:05pm. The iPad app would only allow me to watch the live event. I was unable to rewind. The device only allowed rewinding to the point where I had begun watching live at 2:05pm. Backing out and selecting “watch from beginning” had the same result.

Only after stopping the recording would this app allow me to watch from the beginning.

The device firmware was updated yesterday from 2.2.50 to 2.2.52. Prior to the firmware update, I would be able to watch an from the beginning while it was recording.

Unacceptable. Very frustrated.

This software is not ready; the hardware is terrific. 1) Tablo does not support picture-in-picture functionality … four years after other streaming apps figured it out. 2) CAN NOT start from beginning until recording is finished. You can watch what is being taped, as it is being taped. This makes it no better than a VCR. This is not because I ran out of tuners. I checked. This is because the coders are soft-handed scum that told the incompetent middle management @ this app that the job was done. 3) customer service is manned by the missing link of hominid morphology. I did receive a “reply”, but it showed zero indication of having read my really ke ticket. I solved the problem on my own.

I did not intend to drop $140 for a VCR. Should have done more research.

It took days to set up our 2 tuner device due to connectivity issues. We have very fast internet. Didn’t realize we needed a 4 tuner to cover multiple tvs. So we bought a 4 tuner and gave the brand new 2 tuner to a family member. Experienced the same connectivity issues. Contacted technical support and very disappointed. Then all the sudden, after hours of rebooting everything over and over, it connected. No rhyme or rhythm to connecting. Caused a little tension in our household ;) such a great idea! Hopefully, real improvements will be made to the product over time.

It works well as long as it’s not windy. There’s a lot more channels than I expected. The tv app works well but the default should be the live channel lineup. I don’t want to go to the Home page. When you select the live program you want, it takes you to another screen with the description and there you have to select that you want to watch it. A small pop up that gives options (Live, Start from beginning or record) would be preferable than an whole other screen that takes its time to load.

In the mobile app. You can’t multitask with it. For apple users if you ask Siri to do something, it pauses the show but when Siri is off, the show doesn’t automatically restart and you have to pull up the live menu and select the show you were watching and then it will unpause.

Tablo is great when it works. It seems like there was way to much emphasis put on the streaming aspects and pretty interface elements. On my iPhone 15 it takes an inordinate amount of time to load the startup and once I make it to live tv it works like a charm. Having to wade through the startup and interface makes me want to give up after thirty seconds. I often quit Tablo several times and sometimes it actually helps.

The interface is nice but it doesn’t work correctly.
I cannot watch shows in progress of recording without the timeline getting messed up. Also the beginning of the show doesn’t play first but it starts playing somewhere in the middle or at the end.
The shows that have already recorded seem to usually play correctly, though.
The closed captioning works sometimes but other times it gets stuck on some part of the opening credits which continue to display on every scene.
The video and audio are good and look great most of the time.
When I delete a show, it delete just fine but then shows an error.
Overall, it should still be in beta because the Roku, Samsung and Fire TV apps all work fine without these issues.

I have used this to watch over the air tv from a rural location. Tablo works for me, though it has been far from perfect. At one time, a certain station was not viewable, but the others were. This seems to have resolved itself, not sure if it was an app problem or a device problem (as the device has had firmware upgraded multiple times since, and the problem has not re-occured.

The reason I only give this 3 stars is because of:
1. You can’t switch away from Tablo and have the video collapse to the thumbnail, which you get from about every streaming video app.
2. related to this, it doesn’t even keep the audio going if you switch away from the full screen video. So there is no way to switch to a different app while you wait for the weather or sports in a newscast, for example.

I haven’t tested the recording and playback enough to evaluate it.

As far as the device, if I realized it didn’t support streaming to windows devices, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Otherwise, it seems functional.

I wish that when I select a channel from the guide, not a TV show, it would just play non stop until there is a scheduled recording conflict. Instead what it does is at the end of each show it returns you to the channel guide. There is no way to just watch live TV. You can watch live TV until the show ends, if you want to watch the next show on the same channel too you have to pick from the guide again. Also, when background guide updates fail while you are watching live TV it interrupts your viewing to tell you.

Idk what everyone else is saying about Tablo. I love my this app, and it only sometimes scrambles the signal. Recordings work great! You just can’t watch something at the same time if you are recording 2 things at once. (Assuming you just have the 2-Tuner model) Tablo , however does sometimes crash, or refuse to load on first try. That can be resolved by just reopening it. It works, but as others have said, still far from perfect. I just don’t think it deserves the rating that it has.

I have had my this app v4 for about a year now. The software had quite a few bugs at the start but is quite stable now and getting better with new features over time. Having the ability to see a two week channel guide for free is great as is the ability to record OTA and internet delivered FAST channels. I haven’t seen other devices that offer a two week guide for free or recording FAST channels. If you do run into issues there is a user/manufacturer forum that usually can provide quick solutions.

Since I installed version 1.4.2, when I launch it on my iPad Pro 12 inch, it seems to launch first in portrait mode, despite the iPad being positioned in landscape, then it flips to landscape mode, but the window is still narrow and portrait sized and cannot be resized to fullscreen for the channel guide. ALSO, and more bothersome, when watching recorded network channels, when fast forwarding through them it now pauses, and you have to manually press play after each press of the fast-forward button. I assume this is a bug, not a feature, but I sure hate the way it works.

The apps ok and I appreciate the Apple TV support but there’s no way for me to watch shows on my Mac unless I mirror my iPhone display which is LAME. Seems like a pretty simple fix, you could either:

1. Let me run the iPad app on my Apple silicon. Why wouldn’t you support that?!
2. Make airplay from an iPhone stream video as well as audio.

While you’re at it, let’s make Tablo support PiP so we can multitask, it’s 2025 and we’ve all got a lot of work to do ;)

Perhaps there are legal or business reasons not to implement these features. I want to encourage you to figure them out as this product is SOO close to being delightful.

Thanks for making a really cool product, if you make it a little better I’ll be your biggest fan.

Love this app but… I wish I could watch on a browser at home or do a Picture in Picture so that I can multitask on my ipad while I watch shows. Otherwise, the picture is good, sound is good, I’ve only had one issue with a show not recording and everything else is great. I love being able to watch from my tv or phone or ipad.

Also, we need a notification so that if a show is failing to record due to poor reception!!

I am new to this app so cannot make the comparisons that others have to their former devices/software but my expectations have been exceeded. Is it perfect? The answer is no, but it is also saving me $2400 annually. I just gave up cable. I explored streaming but found that it is pretty easy to rack up subscription fees. Since my goal was to keep costs down and since I was mostly watching network shows anyway, I decided to try this app. Setup was really easy. The guide is user friendly. No complaints so far.