Tablo has announced its all-new Tablo ATSC 3.0 QUAD HDMI OTA DVR. This is the companies first product to support the new ATSC 3.0 standard that is transitioning over the air broadcast television away from 1080i video and towards 4K video. Unlike (most) of Tablo’s past devices, this new DVR is not a networked device for whole-home streaming of OTA content. Instead, it’s a standalone device with a remote and HDMI out, for use with a single TV, which means it’s not compatible with Fire TV devices or any streaming media player.
The Tablo ATSC 3.0 QUAD DVR, as the name suggests, has 4 hybrid ATSC 3.0/1.0 tuners. This means it can stream or record 4 channels, being either ATSC3.0 or ATSC 1.0 channels, simultaneously. To my knowledge, this is the first 4 tuner ATSC 3.0 device where all tuners support the new 4K standard. Comparatively, the HDHomeRun ATSC 3.0 model only supports ATSC 3.0 channels on 2 of its 4 tuners. There is no built-in storage for recordings on the Tablo ATSC 3.0 QUAD DVR, so you’ll need to connect an external hard drive to its USB 3.0 port. Tablo says 4K recordings will consume about 9GB per hour of content and 1080 ATSC 3.0 recordings will use 2.3GB per hour, which is about a quarter of the space that MPEG-2 ATSC 1.0 recordings take up, thanks to ATSC 3.0’s much more efficient use of HEVC encoded video.
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