[mabbo]

Coordinated agents could probably do well at this.

You and your neighbor may not be seeing the same ads[0]. The cable companies and advertising companies can show each subscriber something different on the same channel. But they only do that during ad time- when more customized content is a way to make money. During the show, they're currently incentivized to show you both the same content. Even if this type of thing isn't going on, it's been obvious for 20 years that some ad time is given to local ads vs national ads.

All we need then is a system where each member shares some small hash of what they're seeing on this channel every second or so. When the group sees their hashes diverge, it's ad-time. Turn on your relaxing music.

So long as this doesn't become too common, the cable networks would have a hard time changing their behavior to try to fight this. They make too much additional money with the customized advertising.

[0]When I was a Google intern almost a decade ago, another intern explained to me that her division of Google had bought out 100% of the ad time on a cable network and resold the ad time with targeted customer demographics, making a profit doing so. I can only imagine how crazy the targeting systems are now.