TiVo SkipMode Allows Football Haters To Skip The Super Bowl To Watch Only Ads

Each year for the big game, hordes of people around the U.S. that care nothing about football watch the teams fight it out. The people aren’t watching out of some fascination with which team will win; they watch for the commercials. The big game is probably the only time people want to see commercials when watching TV. If you fall into the camp that cares nothing for the football game but want to see the commercials and you have a TiVo with SKIP enabled, you will love this.

TiVo has a feature called GameSkip that will let you playback the recorded game and skip the actual game and only watch the commercials. GameSkip won’t show up until the game is finished and when watching that recording you can use the SKIP or D button to jump quickly to commercial segments of the game.

Reports indicate that the feature should work with all TiVo boxes with SKIP enabled, but there are things that could go wrong. TiVo Community forum member TiVo_Ted wrote, "This "GameSkip" functionality should work for all TiVo boxes that have SKIP enabled today. However, there are a few things that could go wrong. We use closed-captioning data as a guide to lineup our commercial tag markers with the program. This works great for regular shows, but not all commercials have closed-captioning. Similarly, if there are lots of local/regional commercials that air during the game, that could screw things up as well. If you record the game from NBC and your local station doesn't do anything fancy, we think (fingers crossed) it should work for everyone."

TiVo has also begun going live with support for IFTTT (if this, then that), a free service that allows for connectivity between consumer electronics devices and Internet services. There are some pre-programmed "Applets" on IFTTT to help users get started with them. One of those allows you to use an IFTTT send button to send a command to your TiVo box when a commercial break is detected. If that Applet is enabled, it will send the SKIP/D command to your box every time a commercial airs.

When you use that along with the GameSkip feature you will automatically jump from commercial break to commercial break. TiVo_Ted wrote, "If you have a Roamio or BOLT device running TiVo Experience 3 or TiVo Experience 4 (aka Hydra), you will receive a TiVo message and an invite to join IFTTT. These messages will start to go out in the next day or two, along with an App on your TiVo box that gives you a code to pair your TiVo account with your IFTTT account."

If you plan to use auto-skip, you need to be on a TiVo device using TiVo Experience 4 (TE4). All TE4 devices will be enabled for IFTTT. There are more boxes running TiVo Experience 3 and TiVo is working on rolling out support for IFTTT those boxes, but not all will have support enabled in time for the big game.