I don't think Silicon Dust ever had a 4 stream tuner. They always had a 3 stream unit.
But the 6 stream tuner is coming soon:
https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-prime-6/
So there's that.
So with SD, you have the choice of buying your pay TV from your cable provider OR from them. If you buy pay TV from them, you can integrate it with your antenna TV and make it look like what your cable company provides. One guide, one set of channels, and all recordable in one place.
Options are nice.
I have had Tablo on my radar for a few years now; however, they were clearly not a player for people who come from and expect ReplayTV and WMC features. But within the last year they added some sorely needed features:
https://www.tablotv.com/blog/advanced-r ... -ota-dvrs/
It's hard to imagine using a DVR without these features, but people did. Imagine having it record EVERY SHOWING of a series, and the only mechanism to delete them is either (a) entirely manual, or (b) when it runs out of space it goes to the oldest shows and just deletes what it wants. Imagine no choice for setting a limit per series on how many to keep.
They also struggled with how to present shows. At first it they were listed by recorded date, then they changed it to being listed by show number in the series. And because it kept every show in a series no matter what (reruns, everything), one could find one's self scrolling to the bottom of a long list just to find last night's show.
It *looks* like they're now presenting much more like WMC, which is a good thing. But, there's no cableCARD ability; Tablo is an OTA solution. And its only integration with other streaming services is the fact that the Tablo app resides on the same Roku or FireTV (for example) that has your other streaming apps.
The world is coming together to do what WMC did long ago, but even then it's not all there.
However, as an OTA user, what excites me is the upcoming Tablo commercial skip feature. I may throw some coin at one of their tuners just to check it out. The question always comes up here: "what's my next move after WMC?" We're always looking for it, right? Tablo *may* be it. I think I'd rather do Silicon Dust--but I'll make the permanent move only after some evaluation, and to Silicon Dust only if they figure out commercial skip (which they've sworn in the past they'll never do).
This whole process reminds me of years ago when ReplayTV began to die--first the company, then the TV technology that fed it (analog). I spent several years looking at what's next, and waiting for a cableCARD tuner that would give me my desired goal of a recording tank with remote streamers. When Ceton came out with their first one, the 4 tuner PCI unit, I was there. $433 plus a few weeks for shipping (inventory was very slowly creeping out of the factory), and that was after a few years of hearing the news dribble out--"coming soon!". Does anyone remember the thread about tracking your order and who got what when? And then I had to build a PC to host it all.
And now we're waiting for the rest of the world to slowly get back to where we were--how many years ago?
