Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Tablo Quad Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] for Cord Cutters - with WiFi, Live TV Streaming, & Automatic Commercial Skip, Black

Top positive review

Works great for over the air TV

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2019

I admit - I'm one of the people who bought from Amazon.com Services, Inc for $50 over list price. I didn't research it the price, I had a need, and I wanted it then. I found out the list price after paying for it, but also found that other places were out of stock. I could have been patient and saved a few bucks by waiting a couple of weeks; live and learn.

Previously we used a ReplayTV DVR, which we've used with a digital converter box for many years. This replaces that setup very nicely and gives us access to channels we didn't get before. Having 4 tuners means never having to choose what to record and what to watch live. The picture and sound quality is definitely a step up over our previous.

I did attempt to use it with a Roku 2 box, which worked reasonably well but had frustrating buffering issues. Buying a new Roku Ultra fixed that, as well as speeding up my other Roku channels (Amazon Prime, CW, YouTube, and so on) substantially. The older Roku was having issues with random reboots which I haven't seen in the new box.

I also bought an internal 2TB hard disk, which looks to be sufficient for our needs.

I did have some issues on initial setup, so broke down and called support which has limited hours - Monday – Friday 9:30 AM – 5:30 PM ET - leading me to use e-mail support. I did get a response at 10:19 the next morning with detailed instructions for how to fix my issue, which worked first time.

I've used the interfaces for the PC, IOS, Android, and Roku - all are easy to work and provide good access to the features. The live schedule only shows data for today and tomorrow; this is a change from the ReplayTV which showed 2 weeks of schedule. Shows after that just show up in the summary thumbnail views, where you can see TV shows, movies, and sports and click through to view details and record.

On the whole, it's an excellent product.

114 people found this helpful

Top critical review

All critical reviews›

Sebastian Garofalo

POLICY CHANGERS MAYBE CLASS ACTION ON ITS WAY

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2020

So it works and then it doesn’t . I have to unplug it and reset it a number of times. The worst thing was I paid for a lifetime subscription for the guide which at that time included commercial skip. Now they want to change their policy and charge a separate fee for that. You would think that they wouldn’t do that to existing customers being that we never had knowledge that they were going to do that to us.

98 people found this helpful

Sort by

Filter by

Filtered by

CriticalClear filter

294 global ratings | 177 global reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

From the United States

Sebastian Garofalo

POLICY CHANGERS MAYBE CLASS ACTION ON ITS WAY

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2020

Verified Purchase

98 people found this helpful

Helpful

Nader T.

Needs to be improved

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2019

Verified Purchase

My issues with this product are:
1) Tablo app is very slow to start
2) Changing channels take too long
3) 1080 resolution channels must be reduced to 720 for consistent TV reception. 720 does not look as good on a 4k TV
4) Changing the sound setting from stereo to Dolby will cause no sound on smaller TV's and tablets. Tablo does a terrible job explaining this problem. Fix involves hard reset & restarting TABLO after changing back to stereo.
5) TABLO only works with Roku and Amazon fire TV and sticks. I was not able to get it to work with my 70" Samsung TV.
6) Recording live TV is very difficult to do unless you subscribe to TABLO.
In summary changing channels is a bad experience, resolution is not as good as the antenna and sound processing is only in stereo. Recording live TV is costly.

69 people found this helpful

Helpful

William L. Crow

And now they want me to pay another $20 a Year...

Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2019

Verified Purchase

And now they want me to pay another $20 a year to keep the commercial skip, on top of my $150 "Life Time" subscription, NO WAY!! Dropped to One Star, I don't throw good money after bad.
I purchased this product as a possible lower cost replacement for TIVO. After using it for a week I can say it is NOT stable enough to be considered a TIVO replacement. In the week I have been using the Tablo it has reset at least a dozen times, and that is just the times that I was watching when it reset. Who knows how many times it reset when I was not watching a show with it. I assume it happened many times, since I noticed a lot of recordings that were split into two different files with a portion of the show missing in the middle. If a "DVR" cannot be counted on to correctly record the scheduled shows, it is some what useless as a DVR. This was unacceptable without a subcription little lone if you were paying a monthly fee. This was while the Tablo was only recording one or two programs at a time and streaming to one Roku, under its quoted "Quad Tuner" specifications.
As for the commercial skip feature, it was very hit or miss, maybe 25% of the shows got a complete accurate commercial skip the rest got either nothing or partial skip, forcing you to manually skip the rest. More trouble that just turning it off and doing it yourself. I really wanted to like this unit and could have possibled lived with a crash every now and then, but once or twice every day it a bit much. In my opnion, for the cost of this unit plus the not included harddrive , do yourself a favor and just buy a TIVO and pay the higher monthly fee, you will be happer in the long run.

30 people found this helpful

Helpful

Tom

No go in just about every way

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2019

Verified Purchase

I have an older tivo device and wanted to replace it with something newer that would work with my roku players. I also was interested in the "automatic commercial skip" feature. Three hundred and fifty plus a drive to get going, so I expected a fair bit. Like it'd work. EDIT: FOUR HUNDRED NOW. LETS RAISE THE PRICE ON SOMETHING THAT WORKS BADLY!

I've connected many devices including splitters to my antenna with no trouble before. The tablo couldn't lock a single channel. The device ran very hot, while others say theirs did too until they got a refurb from tablo that didn't. So they have a QA problem. Lots of complaints about the refurb units being DOA. The wifi in my house is excellent, and my phone gets a full blast connection near the tablo. Tablo however couldn't be found by its apps unless you tried a couple of times. So don't expect the wifi to work well and plan to hardwire it.

Whatever you do, DON'T buy it from tablo direct. They charge non refundable shipping and charge you to return it.

Note also that the remote viewing feature ONLY works if you pay for their subscription.

So takeaways are:

- Not going to have better tuners than a load of devices I've had. Pretty weak in fact.
- Not going to have usable wifi in many applications.
- Expect to have to buy a fan or laptop cooler to blow on it.
- Make sure you don't pay for shipping both ways for bad Q&A.

I expected better from a device that all in costs twice what my old tivo cost, service included and is 6 years newer than the tivo design I'm using. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

16 people found this helpful

Helpful

Robert Hankin

Okay device, poor customer service

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2019

Verified Purchase

I was very excited to receive this device. I thought it would allow for multiple recordings of OTA channels, which it does do. Unfortunately, it has weak reception. All I was looking for was a simple device to record OTA TV shows. I do not need all the extra streaming shows and ads for shows. I just want to record and play back TV shows. But, like I said, it has weak reception.

I contacted customer service about the issue. They started with the normal spiel about antenna position and that receiving on a TV is different as it does not encode the signal for recording, but I have tested a TiVO OTA and a Fire TV Recast, both of which had far better signal reception. With the Tablo Quad, I even had entire channels and frequencies missing.

But, that is not my issue. My issue is the length of time it takes to get a response from their support. So far, all responses have taken over a day. On their last response, they asked me to give them remote access to the device, which I did that morning. They never bothered to attempt the access until the following day. I emailed them to ask about it and they never responded. It was not until the next day I even got a response.

So, why would I, or why should anyone, put out the effort to use the Tablo Quad when their support is not willing to put out the effort to make sure the device is working properly?

15 people found this helpful

Helpful

Severe pixilation and freezes or crashes.

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

I had good hopes on this device to replace my Tivo and cable TV service, but what a disappointment. The channel scan worked fine and found about 30 channels, most of them were rated at the highest strength. However when I record or watch live the picture is sometimes or often pixilated or it freezes. It often displays a message that the ota signal is too weak, even though the status of that channel indicates full strength. Audio has similar problems.

If I watch a recorded show while another show is recording, the recording channel interferes with the stream of the recorded show that I'm trying to watch. This thing is supposed to be able to record up to 4 channels simultaneously, but a problem with one channel interferes with the others. The device often seems to reboot and go offline for a couple minutes and then try to restart all the recordings again. And sometimes the device just freezes and becomes completely unresponsive until I pull the power plug and restart it.

Customer service is nonexistent. I tried to call and email them but am still waiting for a response. Do not buy this product!!

16 people found this helpful

Helpful

Shell

Do not waste your money. Never worked. Unreliable.

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

My tablo experience has been nothing but frustrating from the beginning. The unit is unreliable, I can’t watch or record anything more than 10 minutes without my tv screen blanking out with a error message.

Tablo support (I wouldn’t call it that) is not helpful. After 20 plus emails, their response is my router is bad.

My service providers diagnostic suggest my router is optimal.

I hardwired my tablo to my router with zero reliability improvement. Does not work with wifi or when wired.

Replaced Westinghouse external HD with internal Seagate Barracuda HD. No improvement.

Used unit without HD. No improvement.

Uninstalled and reinstalled tablo app from Apple TV. No improvement.

Unit runs very hot. No cooling fan installed from MFN. Tried cooling fan. No improvemrnt.

I have no issues with the five streaming devices in my home with exception of this one.

I asked for a replacement. They will not warranty.
Buyer beware.

I give up.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Brad Stewart

Disappointed

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2019

Verified Purchase

I had high hopes for this device. But it constantly halts when streaming. This is a local network and the internet is not used. The local network is a new top of the line WiFi access point. So I do not understand why it can send video to my Roku. Perhaps the fault lies with Roku, but I would assume Tablo tested theses devices thoroughly.
The Roku application fails often and I have to reset it. The channel guide is marked as "beta" and makes many mistakes on schedules. And I have to pay for it. So it should be 100% reliable.
Sorry, this device is not ready for sale. I regret purchasing it.

15 people found this helpful

Helpful

M. Thomas

It works well but has room for improvement.

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

The Interface
So first of all the interface is much prettier better than the Channel Master OTA DVR it replaced. It makes a list of programs all with cover art that looks more like shows on Netflix instead of text entries. This will require you to pay for guide data to see cover art or have a guide that goes out more than one day. I subbed to the lifetime subscription but I think they should give the free viewers better guide data or let them switch to the guide data provided by the local stations as this is a cash grab to not do this. Now you need to have a great signal quality or you will not enjoy having to delete the multiple recording attempts when the signal goes in and out. I had several programs do this before I purchased a big outdoor antenna. I have never seen a DVR fragment a recording like this so they really need to change the programming to just keep going with the same recording instead of stopping and starting the recording as it is really annoying. The skip forward or backward 10 seconds does not work well. It brings you to the same screen as when you start fast-forwarding and waits for you to choose the point and start the video again, this is not how it normally works on any DVR I have used.

The Reception
My signal quality is maxed and has always been 5 green circles. That being said the Tablo Quad has 4 tuners and they seem to really weaken the signal when it is split by the unit 4 times. Initially, I tried my old directional antenna as I have always used it with past over the air DVRs without problems as I am within 20 miles of the stations. To fix the issue with the signal quality I purchased a very large antenna and it usually works great but some times the big three networks still don't always come in during fair weather which is strange. I used a power booster to bump up the quality as well as an LTE filter. In fairness, my neighbor who is an apparent man-child took up remote control cars recently driving them back and forth on our street. So perhaps that is causing the random interference with the OTA signals. I will have to keep track of this correlation and if he ever lets his kids drive the remote control car.

Channel Skip Feature
Nice when it works but it has sketchy performance or fails to work at all more often than not. This should be a free service to guide subscribers at least until they get it working better.

Channel Surfers stay away
So the unit changes channels so slowly you need to adjust the way to watch programs. You need to view the available programs by list or search and then pick your program to watch live and wait till it loads. This is not the unit you are looking for if you like to channel surf.

Remote Viewing
Works great around the house to watch a program on my phone or other smart TVs. I have not tried it outside my home but it is capable of this feature according to Tablo. Now I suspect this remote viewing feature may be the reason the Tablo won't function if the internet is down but my home network is still functional. This is really annoying when the internet went down and Tablo refused to let me watch live or recorded tv because it could not talk to the mothership.

Final Verdict
The Tablo Quad is a promising unit that I hope will improve with time. If they ever fix these issues I will revise my review to be fair but I am not holding my breath. I just hope they don't dump the support of the unit in a few years as happened with my old Channel Master's guide and internet channels functionality.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Cartoon Guy

Tabloo not so hot.

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

This is a review of the Tablo Quad [TQNS4B-01-CN] Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder. I purchased this at the request of my wife who wanted to record shows off-air. This seemed like a good solution after reading the specifications and the reviews.

The first thing I encountered was that the device could not be found on the network. It said that it could not connect to the Internet through the network. I have lots of experience using computers and ran a computer department for four years so I know little bit about how this should work. After working with it for about an hour and 1/2, I decided to contact their customer support. I called them on the phone and fortunately was number two in the queue so I got into them fairly quickly. The technician couldn't have been nicer. Upon explaining the problem and giving him the serial and model number he told me that they knew there was a problem and that he would need to flash the firmware. He said that he saw that it was connected to their network even though it didn't show that on my end. He said to wait about five minutes and then let him know if I saw a firmware update message. I waited on the phone as it downloaded and installed. Once installed, I was able to make the connection correctly and have the software load. I asked him if it would've connected without the update and he told me there was no way it would've so I basically wasted an hour and 1/2 because they didn't keep their product up-to-date. I thanked him for his help and continued through the setup process. I should also note that I had a 1 TB external drive connected to it in order to record programs. It saw the drive with no problem.

You have to set up the software through an app on your phone that you have to download from the Play store. I wanted to make sure that I could use this without a subscription as I did have any intention of paying a monthly bill and I was assured that could be done. It does come with a free 14 day trial of its software that retrieves all of the program information for the stations that you set up. I assume that after that you're on your own and program it the same way we used to program VCRs with the day, time and channel information.

The one thing that was unclear when I purchased it was that you had to also have an app on your smart television, Firestick, or Chromecast device to receive the program information and to communicate with the devices from your phone. I have a Samsung television that did not have the app installed so I had to go to the app store and install it. Once installed on the television, you can control it from the remote control for the TV.

The app is clunky and is slow to load the channel information. I tried recording four programs at different times and it ended up not recording two of them for some unknown reason. It showed they were recorded but showed 0.00 with no end time on the display for the recording. I'm still not sure why it didn't record the programs. I have subsequently tried to record some and it has with the exception of some that the signal from the antenna was so low it couldn't record. When that was the case, it displayed a message explaining why it couldn't have recorded.

So far it's been kind of hit or miss. The quality of the recording is excellent (you have to tell it the quality of the recording you want in the settings). One of the things that it touts in its advertising is that you can do ad skipping but you can't do that on over the air broadcasts. You can fast-forward through them but you may cut off the beginning of the program as it's not very precise. One pet peeve that I have is that when you go back to play the recordings, the first screen that comes up as a button for delete and options but not for play. You actually have to scroll down the screen in order to access the play button which is stupid. Put the delete button at the bottom and the play button on the top screen. I don't want to delete the program before I even watch it. I can't figure out how this simple design flaw was not detected immediately by the program designers.

Yesterday, when I started the app I got a message that said it could not connect to the Tabloo servers and to check the Internet connection. It wouldn't let me go past that screen so it makes me wonder if I don't pay for the service, what's going to happen because it won't be connecting to the servers to get the program information. I checked the Internet connection which was fine everywhere else except with the unit. I rebooted it and it came up correctly.

I will continue to use the unit and try to update this review as I get more experience using this device.

So far I can say that I am not impressed and I think that the old VCRs were much easier and probably more reliable than this device.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Questions? Get fast answers from reviewers

Need customer service? Click here

‹ See all details for Tablo Quad Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] for Cord...

5 star		58%
4 star		19%
3 star		7%
2 star		6%
1 star		10%

Tablo Quad Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] for Cord...

›

Customer reviews

Customer reviews

Tablo Quad Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] for Cord Cutters - with WiFi, Live TV Streaming, & Automatic Commercial Skip, Black

Top positive review

Top critical review

Filtered by

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

From the United States

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

Questions? Get fast answers from reviewers

Tablo Quad Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] for Cord... › Customer reviews

Customer reviews

Tablo Quad Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] for Cord Cutters - with WiFi, Live TV Streaming, & Automatic Commercial Skip, Black

Top positive review

Top critical review

Filtered by

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

From the United States

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

There was a problem loading comments right now. Please try again later.

Questions? Get fast answers from reviewers

Tablo Quad Over-The-Air [OTA] Digital Video Recorder [DVR] for Cord...

›

Customer reviews