Tablo to Debut Automatic Commercial Skipping in Open Beta

At CES 2019, Tablo, a Canadian OTA receiver manufacturer, announced plans to unveil its Automatic Commercial Skip feature, which makes recorded TV ads skip automatically on over-the-air broadcasts. An open beta for Tablo owners who subscribe to its $5 per month guide will begin in March. The company says the technology is “a cloud-based hybrid of digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms and machine learning.” With it, Tablo apps on Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV and Roku will skip ads without human intervention.

Digital Trends reports that, “in Tablo’s screenshots, you can clearly see yellow sections of a recording’s timeline that have been flagged as commercials,” and notes that, “even TiVo’s much-hyped Skip Mode can’t compete with automatic ad-hopping that works on all OTA recordings, regardless of the source.”

Tablo also unveiled Tablo Quad, a new four-tuner OTA receiver expected to ship in March for $200. It “shares the same design language as its Tablo Dual Lite and Dual 64GB stablemates, but is slightly larger.” That’s because it houses the “extra two tuners” and also gives the user “room to install an up-to-8TB SATA hard drive internally.”

The Tablo Quad also offers improved gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi AC, “which should help stabilize streaming especially when all four tuners are being accessed, assuming your router is AC-equipped.”

Variety dubs Tablo’s Quad as one of the top innovative products of CES 2019. The four-tuner device “allows consumers to record up to four shows at the same time and that offers state-of-the-art networking for buffer-free TV fun.” What “made the device really shine at CES,” says Variety, was its “smart new ad-skipping feature that uses cloud-based video analysis to jump over those ad breaks without altering the actual source video.”

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