Tivo customers who update their DVRs with software coming later this year will have the option to automatically skip some commercials, according to areport from Zatz Not Funny. The auto-skip feature was apparently teased by Tivo Senior Director of Product Innovation David Shoop in a Facebook post. That post was later deleted, but not before a Tivo community member captured andshared it with a wider audience. Zatz Not Funny confirmed the feature will be making an appearance later this year. It won’t be a solution for all ads, however, as the option will only exist on select programs.
Automatic ad-skipping technology has been possible for years, but entrenched corporate interests — particularly those of the broadcasters who air the ads — have had a chilling effect on its availability. When Dish Network introduced itsHopper DVR with automatic ad-skippingin 2012, it wasn’t long before the company was hauled into court by NBCUniversal and Fox, who sought to prevent Dish customers from using the feature. After a lengthy battle, acompromise of sorts was reached in 2016: Dish agreed to disable automatic ad-skipping on recorded Fox shows for a seven-day period after their initial airing.
That protracted legal dispute was enough tokeep DirecTV on the sidelinesafter it had initially indicated it would follow Dish’s lead and launch an auto-skip feature of its own. The industry’s antagonism toward ad-skipping is likely why YouTube TV wasn’t able to offer its customers the ability to even manually skip forward on recorded showsuntil it reached an agreementwith most of its networks in late 2018.
We’ll have to wait until Tivo’s automatic-skipping feature drops to see if there is any backlash.
