Tablo DVR for HDTV Antennas via Amazon
With the cable companies charging about 80 dollars a month, TABLO DVR enables you to record and watch live HDTV from yr antenna from all your connected devices- smart phones, tablets, computers in our out of your house as it does not connect directly to your TV and with an antenna it is free and legal to get live local over-the-air broadcast tv signals in high definition so you can easily say good bye to cable like the other cord cutters- it requires minimum amount of wiring. Tablo is simple- plug in your HDTV antenna and a USB hard drive, connect to your home network via Ethernet or WiFi and start watching free TV. SPVR2-01-NA is the model number for the 2 tuner version.
You can record and manage your shows and use program guide with the the Tablo DVR 4 tuner or 2 tuner. You record all the over the air broadcast onto a hard drive, connect hard drive to one of the two USB 2.0 ports at the back of the Tablo, connect your antenna to the coax connection and connect with the 802.11 wifi or ethernet so you have quite a bit of versatility. It has no HDMI port and it works as sort of a server at home and works on multitude of devices- you can use your smart phone or tablet and its browser, manage your recording as well as watch recorded shows, u can’t watch live TV on smart phone currently but you can on a tablet as there is an app on tablet that allows you to watch live TV. You can use Apple TV or Airplay, Chromecast, you can use ROKU and get full functionality.
To set-up on a Mac using a Chrome browser with Ethernet at the back of Tablo, go on mytablo.com, connect and establish connection, connect antenna, put postal code in and start channel scanning. If you run into problems there is a reset button to reset the unit in 10 seconds. It will pick all channels and there is Plex support- that you will see on the screen. Table takes the big broadcasters and records all of them like regular DVR and u don’t have to pay for them anywhere. You can’t record any cable tv- no Cartoon Network, no Comedy Central. It is all about broadcast TV. 4 tuners means u can record four shows simultaneously and stream up to 6 devices at once- 6 users at home watching 4 different programs. If u look at the way Tablo DVR looks, it is smaller than regular DVR. It has the power button, Ethernet, 2 x USB 2.0 ports and no HDMI port as it doesn’t connect to a TV. It doesn’t have to sit under the TV- it can be anywhere in your house, to a tablet podcast, Airplay with iPad, ROKU.
You need to get internal storage separately, also an antenna port to plug in any over-the-air antenna for broadcast station. It can browse a catalog of shows through Prime Time, search by genres, and once you find the one you like you can record all seasons. Quality is quite good, gives you access to a TV Guide- program info for the next two weeks and in order to do this you need to buy this data from a data provider, in order to access scheduling functionality you need to subscribe through Tablo, which costs 5 dollars a month, 50 dollars a year and 150 dollars for the life time. It is available for Android tablets, but does work better on iOS although they seem to have improved it over time. It works reasonably well for recordings but not great for live television- not letting you in etc. and not working too well, seems to work very well with recordings. ROKU app works fairly well, not the best with live TV but u can browse through the catalog of TV shows, user interface is like a typical ROKU app.
Click here for a closer look on Amazon