As you-know-who broke the news, TiVo has deployed automatic commercial skip capabilities with the latest “Hydra” software update … that has just begun rolling out to Bolt, Roamio, and Mini DVR hardware.
When first initiating playback of a TiVo SkipMode-flagged recording, you’ll be prompted to enable “Auto Skip” to automatically zip by commercial interruption. There’s also an associated settings panel to toggle the feature on/off. And, in my brief time with utilizing Autoskip, it works pretty darn good — you do catch a tiny bit of the commercial break at both beginning and end, along with an associated chime and tag in the upper left indicating “Skip in progress” – which seems like a reasonable transition, vs a potentially jarring quick cut.
Unlike Channels DVR and Tablo commercial skip capabilities, TiVo augments their ad identification technology with human curation. So, given those resource constraints, only prime time television is enabled. Having said that, it’s still a huge convenience and win for us customers.