We got a Tivo DVR shortly after installing a roof antenna.
For those not familiar, Tivo has a “skip” function that allows the viewer to press a button and skip the commercials. You can automate the function, too, but if you do it manually when a commercial starts you get a message to press a button and the DVR will jump you past the commercials.
This is set up manually by the Tivo people. Obviously it only works on programs you’ve recorded – and not all of those. In the listing of shows you’ve recorded, it will add a SKIP label next to the episode information.
OK, so someone watches the program as it airs and somehow sets a start point and an end point for each skip. Many programs never get these points set, so Skip is not available.
But sometimes the DVR listing will indicate that Skip is available for a program, but it’s not. How does that happen?
(This seems to be a particular problem with Jeopardy. I estimate the Skip is there for maybe 10% of the episodes, but half of those episodes aren’t programmed for Skip.)
TiVo is barely functioning at this point. They are close to caving in entirely. I am surprised they still do the skip thing for any shows at all.
In my case the thing that irks me is sometimes you hit the “D” button and it takes you to a minute or more before the end of the commercial block. You still have to FF to get to the show. And their crappy remotes “bounce” too easily and sometimes you skip two breaks ahead.
A lot of things that used to work mostly well with TiVos don’t anymore. Lots of problems with show listings being wrong, etc.
I’d like more information on the upcoming death of Tivo. I ask because my Mom loves her Tivo and is adept at using it. If she has to change to another system, there will be stress for everybody.
TiVo was acquired/merged with a licensing company. Their most recent product release was a streaming stick which entirely omits any DVR features. They are trying to compete with Roku and Roku is on the verge of collapse themselves. Time will tell if their DVRs will continue to see support and if that support lapses we don’t know if they’ll stop working. Eventually TiVo’s parent company will do nothing but own the TiVo patents and monetize them.
As for that skip capability…it’s available on Xfinity’s X1 device too. Much like TiVo the feature’s not available on every program. I suspect this is not a bunch of people in a room marking commercials, more likely there’s a protocol out there that content distributors can use to add commercial time stamp metadata to their video data. If they choose to include it, they DVR can show it, if they choose not to, the feature isn’t available.
A lot of businesses in the streaming and such world are not doing well. Except for the companies like Apple that are skimming a hefty fee off all the others via their app store. Or the music streaming companies that aren’t paying the artists squat. Etc.
If you haven’t figured out how to make money off of other people’s hard work, it’s probably not going well for you.
I think Roku are stagnating a bit, a lot of competition from companies like Apple and Amazon that have their own streaming players. And I recently got a TV with Google TV on it, I was planning on continuing to use my Roku and leaving the new TV as a dumb TV but I gave Google TV a try and it’s pretty good, it’s basically like Android TV and can download many Android apps. I think many more people just buy a smart TV and live with it, they never had a Roku.
I can’t find an authoritative cite for this, but my understanding is that (at least in the beginning) there were people manually marking the end of each commercial break. The marks are some sort of index into the closed caption data. If the closed caption data is corrupted on your recording skip mode won’t work for you. The reason it uses the closed caption data instead of just noting the offsets in minutes and seconds is so that skip mode will work on future showings even if the timing of the commercial breaks is different than on the original broadcast.
I have an Xfinity X1 cable box/DVR and the commercial skip feature seems to only be available on programs from the big three (or four) broadcast networks. I assumed that someone at Comcast was marking the beginnings and ends of the commercial breaks.
It’s available on far more than that. Just yesterday I watched a recorded episode of Deadliest Catch on Discovery and it included the “Smart Resume” (which is their branding for the feature) option. In contrast I watched Better Call Saul on AMC and it was not included. My wife often watches some HGTV shows and most (maybe all?) include the option. I’ve never noticed it on a recorded NFL game…so I’m not sure if that’s an NFL thing or just a general live broadcast issue.
@mattgg’s suggestion that it uses CC content to infer commercials makes some logical sense. Certainly it’s more scalable than a bunch of people tracking this manually. But many broadcasts that do have CC available lack the feature. So either there’s multiple flavors or levels of detail in some CC files making it only feasible for some programs, or more likely (in my estimation) some companies simply opt out of the feature.
I didn’t say that it infers the commercial breaks from the closed captions. My understanding is that somebody marks the breaks manually and the marks are relative to the closed captions instead of being absolute time offsets within the program.
My mother had a VCR back in the day with an interesting commercial skip function. After recording a program it was zip back to the beginning and search for commercials. Somehow it would move the program forward on the tape, overwriting the commercials. (It somehow had significant internal memory, maybe a little HD.) So when it came time to watch the program it went past where ads were without any delay at all. It was amazing to hear the thing zipping back and forth to do this.
It worked quite well.
I don’t think it really takes humans or the latest tech to do ad detection.
(A popular video editing program VideoRedo tries to do ad detection but is less than perfect at it. But this is something done by a lone developer and not a corporation.)
I had a VCR that did this. It would record a program, then rewind to the beginning and then advance, marking the blank intervals. On freeplay, the skip wasn’t instantaneous, it would fast forward through the commercials and put up a blue screen.
When I worked at Blockbuster after it was bought by Dish Network, we were selling Dish Network packages that came with the Hopper DVR, which at the time allowed for four-channel-at-a-time recording, with the AutoHop function to skip commercials in some instances.
The current model can record up to 16 channels at once. And AutoHop is apparently still a thing. How well does it work now?