At least for Xfinity X1 customers, certain channels allow smart commercial skipping when watching programs off the DVR. Each program is divided into (IIRC) blue & yellow bars – the latter marks where the commercials are; hit FF at a commercial break and it will automatically stop where the break ends.
This might be exclusive to channels under the Discovery umbrella and not every show has this feature; I’ve not seen it for repeats of shows that normally would have it. It also won’t work when the program is still being recorded, when the entire bar is red.
Here’s a business idea I’ve toyed with for years. I sell you a device that sends the mute signal when my internet service tells it to. It already knows what channel you’re watching. My internet service has workers watching each channel and flipping a switch for “content” versus “ad”. My device is useless without a subscription to my service, so people have to keep paying me.
Please, go ahead and use my idea, without payment to me. I just want to be able to become a customer.
In the late 1990s the ReplayTV Digital Video Recorder had a feature to ship commercials (that I worked on when I worked for them). It worked by detecting several consecutive black frames, which would usually appear before and after a commercial but rarely to never during a program. ReplayTV was sued by several TV companies who claimed that this feature was essentially a theft of their services. ReplayTV went out of business before the suit was resolved.
That means that you knew my good friend who was, I think, the lead software guy for Replay. I was actually intending to post about your skip feature. I had one of the very first units which my friend gave me before they officially hit the market. As I recall, it only had ten hours of recording time.
My recollection is that there was some kind of interim compromise where it would show several frames of the ad during the skip instead of a straight skip. There was a cheat code that my friend told me that would allow you to have the old skip. He also put in an easter egg where if you entered a phrase in the search box relating to his girlfriend at the time the dots in the user interface would turn into hearts.
You guys really got screwed. The dotcom crash happened a few weeks before you were supposed to go public. A month or two later and my buddy and his future kids would never have to work again.
Cool! I remember the “hearts” code, and the secret “clawfoot portal” that Don named thusly because he had recently bought a clawfoot bathtub. Many years after ReplayTV, Don and I both worked at Roku for a while before I retired, although we were in different groups and didn’t interact much. I was supposed to have dinner with Don and some mutual friends a couple of months ago but the plans fell through.
Don ended up getting married to Modesto Girl and I was the minister. They had two boys and later a fairly harsh divorce. I haven’t seen him in five or six years.