I've cut the cable. How is it that I need more cables?
What happens when you build an antenna, "cut the cable" and lose access to the wireless cable TV streaming app that was feeding some of the TV's in house? Depending on the age of your home, "cutting the cable" could mean having to run an antenna wire to every set in the house to watch OTA TV, just like in the old days. However, if you have good networking in your house, a streaming DVR provides a solution that works with a single antenna drop.
Houses built during different decades have different entertainment and
communication infrastructures built into them. In the 1940's, new residential
construction started featuring telephone jacks (four prong, not modular!)
standard in every room. In the 1950's, new houses might have been built with
speaker wires running everywhere to support a whole home audio system. In the
1960's, grounded electrical outlets became standard. By the 70's, it was was
no longer unheard of to have more than one TV in the house, so homes were built
with 300 ohm antenna drops and rotator jacks pre-wired into a few of the rooms.
By the 1980's, cable TV was becoming popular, and new homes
came with RG59 coaxial cable jacks everywhere. In the late 1990's to early
2000's construction, high speed Internet was the new hotness, and houses were
being built with CAT5 Ethernet drops in every room, along with RG6 coax. By
the 2010's, new houses started showing up with USB charging outlets. Now, in
the 2020's, wireless networking is the thing, and new homes often forego almost
all of that old communication wiring. Interesting, but this can all be a
problem for getting antenna based TV into the different rooms of a house.
Consider my house. It was put up in the 1970's, and built with grounded outlets, telephone jacks in the kitchen and bedrooms, and a 300 ohm antenna drop in the rec room. Later, someone retrofitted RG59 cable TV jacks into the rec room, the kitchen, and master bedroom. In the 2010's, I had an RG6 cable modem connection installed into my home office, and In 2023, I upgraded that to a single OTO fiber Internet connection.
Before cutting the cable, having a TV in every room where I wanted it wasn't a
problem because my cable provider had a WiFi streaming option, and I had
already covered the house with a WiFi mesh network. After cutting the
cable, there was a problem. The cable company streaming didn't work anymore,
and I didn't have suitable antenna drops in all of the rooms with a TV set. I
also didn't really want to put an N-way splitter onto my fancy Jeffrika7b antenna system, since
it lowers the strength of the signal received at each set.
This is where an Over-The-Air Streaming Digital Video Recorder comes into
play. It is a device with an antenna input and TV tuner, a hard disk drive for
recording broadcasts, and a WiFi or Ethernet port for streaming to other smart
TV's in the house. The first of these kind of DVR devices was the
TiVo, which was
launched in 1999.
I had one of the original ones, pre digital TV, and it was great! TiVo set the
standard for what DVR's look like today. However, TiVo has always been an
expensive option, and there are other OTA DVR manufacturers around now that are
worth considering, such as the
SiliconDust HDHomeRun and the
products from
Tablo.
I started out with a Tablo QUAD OTA DVR as my recording and antenna solution
for the
Roku
based TV's and web-browser based computers in the house, as well
as for watching some TV on the phone out in the backyard. It worked
pretty well, mostly. The software was OK, but the QUAD hardware design
was, as we say in the embedded networking device business, 'not terribly
robust'.
The WiFi on the QUAD was lousy despite other devices in the same cabinet
having excellent network access. It turns out that the QUAD has a pair of
super cheapo internal patch antennas mounted waaaaay too close to a
large metallic heat spreader, making it pretty obvious to me what the problem
with the wireless networking was. Since I don't have CAT5 anywhere in the
house, I ended up having to put it on a TP-Link Ethernet Over PowerLine adaptor
to get it to stream reliably. Annoying, but not a big problem. Good thing I
have a 1970's house with grounded outlets! Powerline Ethernet doesn't work without
them.
The networking problem was an easy fix, but the more serious problem was that
the QUAD locked up a lot, and needed frequent manual reboots. This mostly
seemed to happen when it was recording channels that were maybe not coming in
100% perfectly, or when it was recording from multiple tuners at once. This
may not have been a software problem, as the box ran VERY hot. I'm
talking 'uncomfortable to hold' hot. The kind of hot that definitely needs a
fan in addition to a giant heat spreader if there's to be any kind of hardware
longevity. While the QUAD had a
fan mount molded into it's case, there was no
fan installed, and no board pins for adding one. In the embedded networking
device business, we might politely call that
'a market driven cost reduction'
.
Privately, we'd use stronger words.
The Tablo QUAD OTA DVR that I paid $200.00 for, plus $50.00 for a disk
drive, plus $50.00 a year for tv guide data, died less than three months
outside of its 12 month warranty period. It would spin up the disk, but not
light up the power light or the ethernet lights. Tablo support kindly sent me
a different power supply to try out, but, alas. The power supply was not the
problem. After that, they told me that since it failed out of the warranty
period, I'd have to buy a new Tablo. Well that was a full stop "Nope!"
right there. I'm not into buying another of the same badly designed $200.00 TV
tuner each year, espcially not when I have to pay $50.00 a year for guide
data to use the thing. That's too much money to watch recordings of
Jeopardy!,
Hockey Night in Canada,
the local news,
and reruns of
Green Acres
whenever I want.
Tablo support then informed me that the company has changed ownership, the QUAD is considered a "legacy device", and it isn't being produced anymore. They have a new product called a "Tablo 4th Gen" that is half the price. It only has two tuners instead of four, and it doesn't have the "view my antenna over the internet from anywhere" feature that I never used, but it is an all new hardware and software design, and most importantly, it doesn't require the $50.00/yr subscription. I was ready to be done with Tablo forever, but with a 20% off existing customer coupon and a full refund of my mostly unused yearly guide subscription, I was able to get a new Tablo 4th Gen for $30.00. I figured at that price, it was probably worth giving Tablo a second chance. After all, when the QUAD was working, it had been pretty great.
I'm happy to report that (as of October 2023) it was worth it. The Tablo 4th Gen has been super.
No lock up crashes, the hardware doesn't run hot, and the antenna sensitivity
and picture quality are both dramatically improved over the QUAD. I can
not view it in a web browser, and I miss that feature, but the 4th Gen
works fine on my
Roku devices
and my smartphone.
The Tablo 4th Gen OTA DVR seems like a
great solution to getting the picture from the antenna to the screens
throughout the house, and I'm really glad that I gave Tablo another chance.
Whatever the age of your house, If you've built yourself an antenna and want to use it on more than just the TV that it is hooked up to, a Streaming OTA DVR is an excellent solution that doesn't require running more cables, or splitting up your hard earned signal strength. The ability to record and watch shows later, and being able to skip past the commercials when you want to is an nice addition to watching live, over the air TV anywhere in the house, and the subscription-free Tablo 4th Gen is good technology at an attractive price. Give it a try!
(Update January 2024 - I'm sorry to report that Tablo has done some kind
of software update around Christmas of 2023 that makes the Tablo Roku channel
crash after trying to watch live TV for more than ~150 seconds. Recorded
programs play back fine, but live TV is just broken. Tablo support tells me
that they "are aware of the problem", but there's not a solution yet. I'm not
pulling my recommendation of the new Tablo quite yet, because it really did
work great for the previous three months. But if they don't get it fixed
soon, I'm going to be looking for another solution. -Auth)
Update late February 2024 - Tablo finally put out an update to their Roku channel app that fixes the problem, and the Tablo 4th Gen is working again after two months of unusable downtime. It still has a lot of little bugs in the guide, and is sometimes just really slow. But it is back to getting the job done.
Something to consider, I suppose, is that Tablo doesn't appear to have any kind of relationship with the developers over at Roku. When something goes wrong between the two systems, Tablo seems to get in line with support over at Roku just like you or I, or any other consumer would do. That seems like a profoundly bad way for Tablo to run their business, since without Roku or Amazon Fire Stick support, there is no way to watch the Tablo on a television screen.
Tablo needs Roku, not the other way around. Given that Tablo 4th Gen has expanded into delivering FAST channels, a feature that likely encroaches on the same revenue stream that Roku gets from streaming them, I can't imagine that support and compatibility are going to improve. So, until the next time there is a bug somewhere between Tablo and Roku that takes Tablo months to address, I'm going to have to go with "Tablo 4th Gen, Recommended with Reservations". Maybe the software will continue to function and improve, but maybe it won't.