[bglusman]

Do you mean ReplayTV? I owned a Tivo at some point but replayTV was great because it auto-detected ads and had an option (or default behavior?) of skipping them automatically. Tivo you had to manually push 30 second skip 6 times.

[__david__]

TiVo currently has an ad-detecting feature. You used to have to fast forward through the ads (though at 30x speed that just took a few seconds). Now it's still not automatic, but when the commercial break comes you press channel up once and it skips perfectly to the end of the break. It's now almost as good as torrenting!

[Jasber]

I think the original TiVo's had this "auto-skip" feature but had to be removed due to this issue.

[ryan-c]

TiVo had a 30 second skip feature to make manually skipping ads easy that they "disabled" (there was a "cheat code" to turn it back on) to avoid legal issues. They also had a button to skip 8 seconds back, but that was far easier to justify.