Automatic commercial detection and suppression

[spotremover]

Does Snapstream have any plans to implement intelligent commercial skip capabilities? The big media corporations have forced Tivo and ReplayTV to omit such capabilities, but this is a golden opportunity for a software startup.

For analog broadcasts there are blank frame and scene transition detection methods, and for digital broadcasts, there may be metadata tags identifying the commercials. This would be an excellent area for R&D investment.

[zootie]

Lately I've noticed that the ATI TV player tries to display TV ratings for each ad. Whatever it's looking for, it might be a way to delimit video breaks. If full add supresion isn't possible, maybe a skip until next delimiter...