re: Latest opinions on Directv now vs sling vs Vue vs Hulu Live TV

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I suspect their wifi is not great so they have too much latency in the live feed and they use a separate antenna for live OTA.

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It's probably not a wifi issue. I think the "latency" you mention is the 10 second buffer that it does.

It buffers for about 10 seconds when you first tune a channel. This is due to the way it stores and transcodes the signal in order to support so many devices. I don't know if it's an actual technical limitation that can't be improved, or if it's a design choice by going with 10 second video chunks instead of shorter segments. I just know that when you click a channel, you're going to stare at a loading screen for 10 seconds. Now, once you start watching a channel the Tablo keeps it tuned in, so you can switch between two channels (or more if you have the 4 tuner Tablo) and it changes quickly. The same is also true if it is already recording a show on a channel.

This isn't a big deal for me, because usually when I'm watching something live (sports or something), I just want to watch that show and I won't be channel-surfing.

The only thing that kind of bothers me is the Tablo app (at least the Roku one) doesn't overlay the guide over the video. When I pull up the guide it stops whatever I'm watching. I'm hoping for an app update that changes this.