[mythtv-users] Tivo has Commercial Skip in US

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 4:59 PM, Eric Sharkey <eric at lisaneric.org> wrote:
.....
> I'm curious how they do it on a technical level.  They can't do it
> purely on sending back a cut list based just on the clock, could they?
>  Variations on local time clocks and broadcaster clocks would skew
> this enough to be noticeable, I'd expect.

I know there are some patents on the subject (I recall Sony
got a new one recently, and there are others, which is why
some 3rd party commercial detection companies tend to
get into interesting situations).  Just because TiVo tends to
do so, I expect they either have, or are in process of obtaining,
patents in the area too (in some years I believe TiVo makes
more money off their patents then they make in the rest of
their business).

I can conjecture about a few ways it would work (especially
for network programming (which is what this is) since the
networks (mostly) enforce the commercial insert schedules
so that a time based cut list would be able to provide strong
hints to the heuristics to be able to adjust for any minor
variations).  Regardless, I am not going to read all the patents
and try to figure out which one(s) this solution might be using.
If someone wants to do that patent research, please do share.