Tablo has made a couple of new announcements for CES 2019. The first is the release of a new product called the Tablo QUAD which is an over-the-air DVR that packs in 4-tuners, which is twice as many as in their existing Tablo DUAL models. It doesn’t have any built-in storage, but it does feature a user accessible 2.5″ internal hard drive slot, which is a first for a Tablo device, that gives customers a sleeker alternative to using an external drive connected to the device’s USB port. Also being announced is a new automatic commercial skipping feature.

After recently releasing a completely redesigned 2-tuner DVR, the Tablo DUAL, a new 4-tuner model was to be expected, but what is unexpected are some of its new features. Like all previous models, the new Tablo QUAD has a USB port for connecting an external hard drive for storing recordings, but this new model is the first to include a slot for internal 2.5″ SATA hard drives. This provides a much more clutter-free setup. Both the USB port and the internal drive slot can accept up to an 8TB drive for as much as 4,000 hours of HD recordings.

The Tablo QUAD is also the first model to bump up its Ethernet connection to Gigabit speeds and it also offers 802.11ac WiFi with an “upgraded chip.” It will cost $199.99 with no included storage.

On the software side, Tablo is announcing a new automatic commercial skipping feature that is coming soon in beta. The feature will arrive in late March to all Tablo models, but it will require their existing subscription service, which runs $5 per month or $150 for a lifetime account. This subscription is what already provides Tablo customers with extended program guide data beyond the included free 24-hour data, content metadata, cover art, out-of-home streaming, and more. Commercials will be detected using Tablo’s cloud-based machine learning algorithms. Tablo apps will mark detected commercials on the playback timeline in yellow and an option can be toggled on to automatically skip those commercials.