A big bite cost wise for people wanting to go OTA. A good external hard drive is needed if one wants to record their daily shows. Along with a subscription to Tablo. At $300 for the Tablo, $150 lifetime subscription to Tablo, $100 for a external hard drive and $50 for the Roku (unless you have a smart TV), we've invested 600 clams to give the cable and dish companies the finger. However, Dish just jacked up our monthly dues to $97 a month. Sooo, simple math. Six months and we'll be saving money. Tablo is relatively easy to set up out of the box. An Ipad or smart device is needed for the setup. A warning for USA purchasers! Make sure your bank credit card company does business with Canada. Tablo is located in Ottawa, Canada. To subscribe to Tablo Guide Data Subscription my bank declined any charges outside the US. I ended up having to using a high interest credit card to make this transaction. Come on Tablo! Paypal please!

Good features, relatively easy setup, wifi setup was iffy Set up was very easy, though minimal instructions are included. More are less plug and play. Ethernet is easy, wifi takes a few tries. With coax cable from antenna, all of the channels look good. The channel guide is good but requires a monthly fee. The Tablo requires a mobile device to control, but connection and software are fairly easy and quick. Initialization takes several minutes. The device will be more useful once they have an app for AppleTV. I love the AppleTV and once the two devices work well together, we will finally be able to end our cable subscription. We have the four tuner version, so we can record all of our shows. Easy to record shows, selection and playback are easy on the TV or mobile devices. An external hard drive is required to record shows, plug in a USB drive and you are good to go. The price is a little steep especially with adding a hard drive, but there are few alternatives since I like the AppleTV over Roku or other devices.

Great product that records live TV just like we expected, unfortunately, I hate having to spend $300 for a product + another $60-100 on an external HD and still be required to pay monthly for it. This is the reason behind the 4 stars otherwise I love it. For anyone who isn't aware, if you want to record live TV (which is probably why you want this) and you watch multiple shows at once, you have to pay monthly for tablo's subscription service in order to set it to record a series ONCE and be done. Otherwise if you are not paying you have to set it to record each show EACH time it airs and once it records you have to go back and schedule another recording. For someone like me who watches 6+ shows at once I like the ability to set it once and forget about it.

This device differs from other devices in that it does not connect directly to the TV, but instead relies on a home network to distribute signals to Rokus, Amazon Fire TV's, etc. You also need a over the air antenna and an external hard drive. You can also view your recorded programs while away from home on a computer, tablet, smart phone and certain streaming devices such as Amazon Fire (but not Roku). I understand that Apple TV and certain new LG smart TV's will also have apps allowing you to view recorded shows. They've done a lot of improvement on the apps the past few months, so the experience today is better than early adopters may have experienced. It does NOT work with cable (analog, QAM, or encrypted) and it will not record from A/V input. It only work with over-the-air digital signals in the US and Canada. Due to the novel distribution method, you may need to adjust some settings on your router. We have experienced a few glitches, but their customer support is the best I've seen.

Recently I was the target of yet another price increase from my cable company (Cox). In years gone by this was my cue to call them & haggle, but I'm fed up doing this & it only postpones the pain. Instead I decided to expend my energy looking at cutting the cable TV cord. We are taking this transition very slowly, but I believe I am in a position to review the Tablo now. Analyzing our TV watching showed that we watched mostly OTA TV, with only a few shows from regular cable (TNT, etc) & then several shows from premium cable (HBO, SHO). We opted for the 4 tuner as for an extra $70 it seemed worthwhile never having to choose between recordings. antennaweb.org showed that all the locals we watched *should* be available at our location, but of course we couldn't be certain until we actually tried it. Fortunately - despite questionable terrain - using a ClearStream 4V in the attic the tablo got all the channels we wanted. And then some! All told between tablo, antenna, USB drive (5TB) & lifetime guide subscription our tablo rig cost quite a bundle. It seemed VERY expensive until we do the math - even paying for some streaming services, I reckon we'll save around $100 a month. (We had a LOT of channels with the cable company, but IMO they deliberately slice things to encourage that.) Anyway, the tablo is different from the cable company DVR. There are some minor annoyances (e.g. slow startup on streaming, so I tend not to flick-thru-channels on Tablo), but nothing that can't be avoided/worked around. The guide is awesome. Much better than the cable company DVR guide that I'm used to. I really like the fact that I could add my own drive as we were forever running out of recording space on our (admittedly ancient) cable DVR,. When we first got the Tablo there were some playback issues in Chrome, so I really liked being able to use a different mechanism to prove that it was Chrome misbehaving (used a VLC plugin). The Roku 4 is probably going to end up on my shopping list as the preferred playback mechanism ... as I mentioned we're taking the transition very slowly. Oh, and the product seems to be improving all the time. I've applied a couple of updates at this stage. One of them removed the 2TB limit on disks, so it was after that that I purchased a new 5TB drive, previously having just used a smaller one I had at hand. All told, a very satisfied user so far.