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- So one of the things I absolutely recommend doing
if you're gonna get rid of cable or satellite
and become a cord cutter is this, get an antennae.
Stick it outside, point it in the right direction
and you're gonna get all kinds
of local channels over the air for free.
But if you wanna go even further than that,
you're gonna wanna pick up what I call
an over the air streaming box.
You plug your antennae into that and then it connects
to your network and it spits out all those local channels
all across your wifi so you can use it
on pretty much almost any device that's out there.
You can watch on your TV, you can watch on your phone,
you can watch on your tablet, you can watch on your laptop,
you can watch on other TVs.
And some of these over the air boxes make it super easy
to record because you can just plug a hard drive in.
And that brings us to this little guy, the Tablo Quad.
You ready?
Let's go do the CordCutters.com thing and go take a look.
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So this is the Tablo Quad, it was announced
in January at CES and it's gonna cost $199
and you can't buy one yet.
It'll be available in March,
that's just how these things go.
I already got one, you can't have it yet,
that's why we're doing this.
So if you've ever used a Tablo before,
you pretty much know what you're gonna get, right?
And that would be a really good over the air TV experience.
Plug in your antennae, plug in some power,
hook it up to your network, scan for some channels
and you're done, you can watch it pretty much anywhere.
Now Tablo's big claim to fame is that it makes recording
over the air TV really easy, all you'd have to do
is plug in a hard drive or previously they had a model
that had a 64 gigabyte hard drive, but that really wasn't
worth getting 'cause it was just so little storage.
But the Quad does something a little different.
First, as the name implies, it has four tuners built into it
instead of just two, which was the most
you could get on Tablo before.
Four means that you can watch and record up to four things
at the same time, that's better than two.
Four is better than two, I did the math.
Now the other really cool thing here is,
actually also the hard drive okay?
But instead of plugging one in the back,
which you can still do, this one
actually takes one internally.
You take off one screw, slide in your serial ATA drive
and it's just done, it works, it's so easy,
it's so much cleaner, no wires running everywhere,
no exposed hard drives, love it, thank you!
Now this part's important, so I'm gonna say it
really slowly, Tablo Quad does not come with the hard drive.
Now if you're anything like me,
you just have one laying around, right?
Here, you can have this one, here, no?
Okay, they're pretty cheap, I'll actually leave a link
in the description if you wanna go pick one up there.
Super easy to do though, just pop off the screw,
slide it into the box and you're done.
All right, so that's the hardware.
What else is going on with this thing?
Well, first is that you're gonna need some apps, right?
And Tablo is pretty much available on everything.
Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV,
Xbox, Chromecast, you name it, it's on there.
Oh, and you can also watch in a web browser,
so that pretty much covers everything.
Let's talk about the onscreen guide for a minute though.
Now there's a free one with Tablo and it gets you
one day's worth of programming and you can still record
live TV and play back all your recordings.
But there's also a subscription version that gets you
way more stuff, so it's gonna add things like thumbnails
and a bunch of different views and filters
for things like sports and movies.
You'll have more show info and a lot more recording options
and it also has the ability to stream
while you're away from home.
And I think those last two things
are really the bigger deals here.
So how much is this bigger, better guide?
Well it's $5 a month or $50 a year if you pay all at once.
Or if you want, you can do a lifetime subscription for $149.
And do note that that's per account,
not per device, not per box.
So you're upgrading from an older Tablo box to this one?
You're not gonna half to buy
the subscription again, very cool.
Now again, you don't have to have this, okay?
The free guide works really well,
it's just that you're gonna get a lot more
with the paid subscription including
better recording options, so if recording's
really your thing with over the air TV,
you might want to look into that.
One way or the other though, you've got
a 30 day trial to figure it out.
So what's Tablo Quad like to use?
Pretty darn good.
It's got probably the best user interface and onscreen guide
of any of the over the air boxes that I've used.
It's really good on Apple TV and I tell ya,
it's down right gorgeous on Roku and the controls are simple
and really intuitive and that's good because that actually
makes up for the fact that it's still a little slow
and that has to do with what's going on inside, okay?
It's taking the over the air feed and converting all that,
it's called transcoding to make it easier to spit out
on your network and record onto the hard drive.
That means when you change channels, it might take
a couple of extra seconds, that's just the trade off
for this sort of thing and actually,
Tablo's worked really hard to minimize that lag time.
It's gotten better than it used to be for sure
and it doesn't bother me quite as much as it used to,
but it's still noticeable.
And also, all that transcoding didn't kill the video quality
for me like it did on say the Amazon Fire TV Recast.
By the way, go watch that video if you haven't.
It's a good comparison for this.
So all in all, it's a pretty solid buy.
Now again, it's not cheap at about $200
and you still gonna have to bring your own hard drive.
On the other hand, this is all about the ease of use, okay?
If you want cheap, just plug your antennae
into the back of the TV, but if you want easy viewing
and recording, I think Tablo Quad is
the best there is at this point.
So that's it, if you've got any more questions
about the Tablo Quad or over the air TV
and all that in general, hit me up in the comments,
find me on the social, send me an email
phil@cordcutters.com, be sure to subscribe to the channel
if you haven't already and go tell
all your friends about it.
Super important, we gotta get the word out there, right?
So that's it for the Tablo Quad, see ya later.
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