Tony, you'll watch more once you get a PVR. I don't watch much TV either, but now that I know that I have shows waiting for me on my Tivo whenever I decide to turn it on, it's a much more enjoyable experience. My favorite thing to do is wait 5 days then watch a mini-Simpsons marathon from syndicated reruns. This makes me more inclinded to fire up the TV because I know I won't just be surfing (can't remember the last time I did that).

I know that with the Tivo, there are undocumented features and many hacks. One is a psuedo commercial-skip where one of the remote's buttons gets remapped to skip ahead 30 seconds (the length of most commercials). But I've gotten pretty good at just fast forwarding through commercials anyway. They always seem to end a block of commercials with a commercial for the local market or the network itself so you know to slow down soon.

Maybe SonicBlue will be wise to "hide" the commercial advance feature and leave it there for advanced users to find? I agree that it's a silly issue and the one thing that set RePlay apart from Tivo way back when they were just concepts at the CESA (yes I've been following that long!) was that Replay wasn't in bed with the networks and would allow commercial advance. (The only other distinction was that Replays cost more upfront but all had the lifetime subscription included.)