Tablo

[John Ranalletta]

Tired of high costs, I jumped from Comcast cable TV to YT TV in the last year.  Stand both on their heads and you can't tell the difference in quality or price.

 

There are only a couple of stations I need like PBS but without cable or YT, recording programs was impossible; so, I'm trying and liking Tablo.  You can read for yourself, but, in short, once installed and hooked to your wifi, it gathers up all the OTA stations and presents them in a comcast-like guide for browsing.  In Indy, one can get 40+ OTA stations.  Most are crap, but the local CBS, ABC, PBS and NBC stations are what I wanted.  There is a handful of stations I'd not seen before on YT or Comcast that are interesting.  Users can set recordings for later viewing.

 

I'm pleased.  I traded 12 monthly payments of nearly $100 for one payment.  I mounted the Tablo tuner and antenna in a closet.  No muss, no fuss.  Likely, Tablo provides more value in larger markets with more OTA stations.  There's a smartphone app to view programs within your personal wifi zone.

 

[John Ranalletta]

Synology Bee Station...another tech adventure.

 

I've added a network attached server (NAS) to my home network called Bee Station from Synology.  It's an private cloud experiment in progress.  High end users likely already have multi-terabyte NAS appliances which would be overkill for moi. 

 

My goals were to able to access documents when away from home, backup (synchronize) selected folders (docs, Garmin files, etc.), save photos from my iPhone automatically to the Bee "cloud", etc. 

 

With 4 terabyte of storage, it's more than enough for my photo, document and and audiobook collection.  I can invite others to use the Bee cloud privately, i.e. I cannot see their files or photos.   

 

It was very easy to install and it's managed with apps on the desktop or smartphone.  It's meeting my backup storage and file access needs.  YMMV.

 

 

 

[realshelby]

I have a VHF antenna ( actually 2 of them...) mounted in my attic. These are the old school directional TV antennas we used to see everywhere. You do NOT need a digital antenna for modern broadcast TV stations. As with any antenna, bigger is better. 

 

I can scan for digital broadcast here in the Houston area and get around 150 channels. Most are....not in my interest group. But many are. For Zero dollars. I do have Direct TV satellite. Works well....and is the only really good way to get our favorite stations when traveling in the RV. But I am seeing where streaming could replace even Direct TV. Most new TV's allow you to remove unwanted channels to streamline looking for content. But they do NOT have a DVR like the stuff the post is about. Going to be interesting where this tech goes over the next few years.