[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.