QuickMode adjusts the audio to make it sound normal and not like a high-pitched “Alvin and the Chipmunks. The Bolt also introduces QuickMode, which plays recorded programs about 30 percent faster than normal speed to cut down on the time it takes to watch. “It’s a double-edged sword, but from a consumer standpoint, we’re not enabling people to do anything they can’t do today.” The company hasn’t consulted with the 20 networks in creating SkipMode tags and didn’t know if there would be fallout. Jim Denney, TiVo’s vice president of product management and strategy, said TiVo was “trying to err” on the side of consumers. The SkipMode feature lets you skip ahead to the end of a commercial break and resume watching instantly, all with the press of a button. And even the basic DVRs let viewers fast forward through ads, a practice that remained a grudging compromise for the TV industry since viewers could still see the spots as they sped past on their screens.īut until now, TiVo has tried to stay clear of the controversy to maintain its relationships with the TV industry. Still, ad-skipping hack codes have long been posted on the Internet for TiVo owners to program themselves. More recently, satellite TV provider Dish Network last year had to water down its automatic commercial skipping DVR technology, Auto Hop, in negotiations with the big networks over program retransmission rights. My recording of SNL from this past Saturday is missing the usual commercial skip. Most of my recent programs do not have skip available. TiVo is adding electronic tags that mark the start and end of commercial segments, called “pods.” Pushing a new green button marked “D” on the remote signals the TiVo software to skip through those ads without a trace and resume playing the show.Īd-skipping has been a sore point between DVR companies and TV networks since the inception of the technology in the late 1990s because TV executives feared revenue would diminish if viewers stopped watching commercials.įor example, the company that made ReplayTV, an early competitor of TiVo, was forced into bankruptcy fighting TV industry lawsuits over its commercial-skipping and show-sharing features. There is a lot of manual work that has to be done to get the skip enabled for a show, from what I recall. But TiVo is also rolling out SkipMode, which lets viewers completely skip through commercials on shows recorded from about 4 p.m.
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