[RankingMember]

Been theorizing something similar (but in reverse), the purpose being to mute the TV when ad breaks occur (I watched too much football (American) last season and the ads are just the worst). The system would be trained to recognize the bumpers, score graphics, and lack of announcer voices to enable mute, then reverse the same to unmute. Obviously this is all much easier said than done, but every time I see that "I got you a puppy and you got me a truck!" ad it gets fleshed out further.

[bb88]

Black screen detection and audio cues are often used to detect commercials. With sports it should be even easier, since ads don't look like the field or court the athletes play on.

Personally I think it might also be easier to convert the audio to your own close captions in more real time and higher quality ( and better than what the broadcast typically gives you) and leave the sound on low. I like the crowd noise and the announcers, but I also like my sanity more.

[gnicholas]

Sometimes we get home when a game is already in progress, which allows us to fast-forward through ads until we’re synced up with the live game. It is nicer than having to play the mute/unmute game. As you said, sports commercials are pretty awful.

[yummypaint]

Smart TVs certainly have the hardware capability to do this already. Many already run content detection. It's purely a problem of will and software. I never understood why there is no open source smart TV firmware.

[segfaltnh]

I vaguely recall TiVO doing something like this in the 90s, and then pulling back the feature, probably because partnerships weren't as interesting when your product removed revenue...