This is a photo of Tablo’s Apple TV app; this list of shows is might nicer to scroll through than the one built in to my Samsung television.

Back in the mid-seventies, when I was young and the recording industry thought it was old, I bought a cheap tape recorder at a yard sale. It was a portable cassette recorder, portable in the sense that it had a handle and was smaller than my dad’s breadbox-sized reel-to-reel. I used it to record songs off the radio, by putting its cheap plastic microphone on the carpet near the speakers on my parents’ console stereo.

It was an amazing experience and hooked me on listening to “my” music, when I wanted to and how I wanted to. It was a very short jump from there to the Columbia Record and Tape Club, where, of course, I bought cassette tapes at least once a month.

I listened to these tapes constantly, playing, pausing, fast-forwarding, and rewinding through my music collection. I distinctly remember a few months (or, given my frame of reference at the time, a few weeks) later, watching television, deciding I wanted to watch a scene over again, reaching my hand out to hit the rewind button on the television, immediately realizing how silly of a mistake it was.

So when I saw the Clearstream TV app show up for Apple TV and realized it was an app for pausing, rewinding, and occasionally even fast-forwarding through live television, I immediately wanted one. Even though I don’t even watch broadcast television anymore.

Turns out there were or were about to be several devices for watching live TV through an app. The Clearstream looked nice because of the price—only a hundred dollars. But the reviews were bad, and I preferred something that works over Ethernet. Mohu, whose Mohu Leaf antenna works reasonably well on my downstairs television, was about to come out with one that would connect to Ethernet. It was a hundred and fifty dollars, but I was toy-crazed and waited impatiently.

Unfortunately, the initial reviews for that were also bad.

I had looked up the Tablo early on, but it ran at least $200; the Tablo 2 occasionally went on sale for $180 but requires a USB hard drive. After giving up on the idea of time travel through live television, I happened to find the refurbished section of the Tablo web site. The Tablo 2 was available, and for the $100 price that makes a lot more sense to me for an over-the-air WiFi device. It would mean scrounging up a hard drive, but that’s not too hard. I have several in my closet that I don’t trust for data I care about. This is data I wouldn’t care about. And even a new one terabyte hard drive^• only costs about $50.

Setup of the Tablo TV is very easy. The hard part is finding the right spot for the antenna, but that’s made easier because you set it up through an app on your phone or tablet. That makes it easy to move the antenna until the right stations come in best.¹ Unlike with the TV, which required contortions to view the television while positioning the antenna, I was literally holding the antenna in one hand while holding my iPad in the other, rescanning for station strength.

This is a bad location to put the antenna.

Much better!

Once set up, it needs to download program data for your location; but it’s smart enough to let you start using it before the full data downloads. Programming the DVR to record, at least with the $5/month subscription, is dead easy.² You browse through upcoming movies or television shows in alphabetical order and mark the ones you want to watch.³

These are the horror movies that will be playing in the next two weeks over the air in my area.

It’s exactly that easy. If it’s a television show, you can mark it to record the whole series. This is how I watched The Orville’s first season, how I’m rewatching The Six Million Dollar Man, and how I’m finally catching The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Orange means I’ve set this series to record, whenever it shows up and on whatever channel.

Using a DVR is especially nice for sports. When I watched Michigan State games this fall, I set the DVR to start recording when the game started; I joined in an hour later, and by the time the game ended, I was caught back up, due to skipping over the commercials I didn’t want to watch.

Mind you, DVR doesn’t help when lightning delays the game three hours.

I’m using a one terabyte drive; it looks like, for me anyway, that’s overkill. After a three-week vacation in which I didn’t watch anything and so didn’t delete anything, I still had 802.28 GB available.

Having more tuners is useful; there have been a couple of times where I’ve had to choose among shows to record, because three shows were on at the same time.⁴

The app also makes it easy to watch live television—easier than the cable browser I’ve seen in houses that have cable television. The live guide shows a standard grid of shows.

This is a photo of Tablo’s Apple TV app; this list of shows is might nicer to scroll through than the one built in to my Samsung television.

There is a ten to fifteen-second delay as the video is buffered. If one of the stations is flashing red, that means it’s recording. If you switch to a station that’s already recording, you go into it instantly instead of with a delay, because the channel’s already buffered. A station might flash red even if you don’t have a recording set, because it keeps recording the most recently-watched station for about fifteen minutes; that way, if you go back to that channel, it starts up immediately instead of having to buffer.

Channel 7-2 is in red; that means it’s currently recording, which means I can immediately switch in to watch that channel.

Pausing using the Apple TV remote is a snap. It’s just as easy to backup and rewatch a scene.

The only drawback of watching television live, besides not being able to fast-forward beyond the current time, is that fast-forwarding and rewinding don’t show previews. The scrub previews are created after the show is recorded; a show in progress doesn’t have them; thus, for example, when fast forwarding ahead through the Michigan State games I did not have a preview to help me, because the game was still going on.

However, Siri on the Apple TV’s remote works fine: you can jump ahead or back by a specified amount of time using voice commands.

Live television is still crap

Is it worth it? I think so, but I like toys. Between buying the Apple TV nearly two years ago and buying the Tablo TV in October, I have watched live television literally two or three times. Even the 2016 debates I watched live-streamed over an app or the web. The only television show I watch, NBC’s The Blacklist, is available for several weeks after airtime on NBC’s Apple TV app, for free.⁵

Watching live television became incredibly annoying compared to streaming. The ability to pause and rewind, and to watch on my own schedule, make live television frustrating.

Further, television remotes suck, and the benefits of live television didn’t over come that. I watch movies in the dark, and I have never been able to get used to the ridiculously over-filled remotes that come with televisions and DVD players.⁶ One of the nicest things about using the Tablo is that I get to use the AppleTV remote to watch live television.

Even with the Tablo, I probably only watch about half of what I mark. A lot of television stations are still crap. MeTV actually chops the tops and bottoms off of older shows to make them fill more of the screen⁷. Movies! usually doesn’t cut, neither to fill the screen nor for time, but it does blank out nudity and profanity. The Eyes of Laura Mars was filled with blurs. And even in The Assassination Bureau they blurred out the advertising fliers for the Moulin Rouge.

That said, I have enjoyed watching old television shows that I haven’t seen in decades, or have never seen. And it’s nice to be able to watch Sunday morning news shows on my own schedule—and be able to fast forward through segments that don’t interest me. Even college football, which I have no interest in watching after the outcome is known, is more interesting to me now that I can have the Tablo start recording when the game starts, letting me start watching when I feel like it and fast-forwarding over commercials and boring parts until I’m back in sync.

At $100 for the refurbished Tablo 2-Tuner, I am very satisfied with my new toy.