6. Advertisement Management With SmartSkip

There was a time not long ago when I had decided that automatic advertisement detection was a myth. Not because it doesn't exist, but because I am not one of the few brave souls out there that can actually muster up the patience to get it to work. The process usually involves downloading a user-created application that somebody made in their spare time. After you install, configure and run it, the application inevitably crashes and produces a really unpleasant-looking error report.

After your miserable failure, your only option is to post the error report in a forum hoping that someone will be able to offer advice. If it sounds like I have gone through the process a few times I have-and I hated every moment of it. Since I value my sanity, I eventually concluded that advertisement detection is not worth the effort and threw in the towel.

Welcome to heaven. That is, if your idea of heaven involves automatic commercial detection that is offered standard in a commercially available PVR application. SmartSkip is a BTV tool that can be set to automatically scan a recorded TV file and mark the commercial breaks. Depending on the speed of your CPU, the process takes anywhere from a half hour to an hour to scan and mark a one hour SD or HD file.

Since SmartSkip has to play through the whole video to find the commercial breaks, some slower processors will be less effective detecting the advertisement blocks. After SmartSkip has scanned the file, each marked block of advertisements can be skipped with a single press of a button on your remote. Regrettably, SmartSkip does not remove the advertisements from the file, but if you are willing to spend a little time in the Snapstream forums, there appears to be several options available to accomplish this task. SmartSkip was recently made available for HD files in BTV 4.

I was definitely surprised to find that Snapstream is willing to risk offering advanced advertisement skipping in BTV. Advertisement-detection technology is a controversial topic. There is a lot of money to be lost by cable and broadcast companies if advertisements are easily skipped. A lawsuit involving another PVR program called Replay TV got a lot of attention a few years ago. Then, owners of Replay TV were sued for offering a 30-second skip option that was designed to skip whole commercials one at a time. Although the 30-second skip feature is widely used now, most commercial media PC software developers seem unwilling to develop more advanced commercial skipping options such as SmartSkip.