It worked almost every time and for the times it doesn't there is still the 30 sec skip button.


Has the commercial skip technology improved that much, then?

Last time I played with commercial skip was on a VCR, and it would catch about 85% of the commercial breaks; the rest of them it would play.

But more important -- about once an evening it would decide that a quiet/dark scene in a program was a commercial break, and would take off and start fast-forwarding through the program looking for the end of the "break" which never came.

Even if my TiVo had Commercial Advance (tm), I probably wouldn't use it because it is so easy to FF (60x viewing speed!) through a break, and at the same time see what commercials are being skipped. (Sometimes there are commercials I actually want to see.)

tanstaafl.