What you and Tod are forgetting is that the Replay is a PVR and has the entire show on the hard disk. It can detect both potential "in" and "out" points of each commercial break. If there's not an out-point within X number of minutes of an in-point, then it can assume it was a "false" and won't try skipping that particular commercial.

Correct. And ReplayTV units do use a buffer during live TV to commercial skip. The program must be at least two minutes delayed for the feature to work. One of the things that can prevent commercial skip from working is late night shows with solid commercial breaks, like mini-infomercials. The ReplayTV unit refuses to skip any moment longer then two minutes.

I have had my unit cut a small section of a show off once. It was easy enough to hit the back arrow (jumping to that point) and disable commercial skip. The benefit of rarely touching the remote to skip commercials is well worth that slight risk to me. And I can tell the engineers at ReplayTV are still working on it to make it better, as the last software upgrade brought my unit back closer to the 90% success mark.