Annoying Commercials

It's called XM. The only way broadcasting could have the cost covered, without advertising, is with subscriptions. But it would be nice!

 

I can't stand CMs either, and am someone to constantly change the channel once a CM comes on -- or if it's a podcast with a "brought to you by", I instantly FF a bit. I can't remember the last time I let something just play untouched when CMs come on.

The free answer is to listen to NPR, where you DO have "sponsored by" ads, but only a few, and they're usually only at the beginning and end of the broadcast (when you can easily turn it off or to something else for a bit).

Your suggestion reminds me of the VHS player I once had, that had a "30 Sec" button on it. Each press made the VCR skip ahead 30 seconds. Very convenient...

 

Podcasts.

Bob Wilson

 

That feature was known as "Commercial Skip". I had something even better, a pricier feature found on some Panasonic models named "Commercial Advance", using a proprietary algorithm that some guy invented which could detect the beginning and ending of commercial breaks. The actual method was kept secret, but apparently it detected changes in the electronic signal that occurred at the beginning and ending of nearly all commercial breaks. It worked incredibly well. You would set your VCR as usual to record say a thirty minute program. When the recording ended you would hear it rewind to the starting point, then it would fast forward at high speed through the recording so that it could mark the commercial breaks. Then later when you played the recording, when a commercial started it would automatically fast forward through the entire commercial break. You would see the commercials going by at high speed but with no sound. As it approached the end of the commercial break it would start gradually slowing down, ultimately and smoothly arriving at normal speed at the exact moment that your program started again, and the audio would then resume exactly on time. It was so accurate it was eerie. The only flaw was that occasionally it would not skip a commercial, apparently because it wasn't able to confidently detect whatever signals it was looking for. But that didn't seem to happen very often.

Sadly for whatever reason (probably legal) Commercial Advance did not make the transition to DVR's. I think one of my thumbs is now shorter than the other from manually fast forwarding through commercials.

 

Commercial Advance... ah, the good old days
And Tideland makes a great point about the cache radio.

Though slightly off topic, I'll ask it here, as it's not worth starting another thread. When you're doing Navi, you can't change the volume of the navigation speech while it's going on, right? I know you can go into settings and change it in settings, but as it's speaking, if a loud noise goes by and you need to make it louder (or it's too loud an annoying), you can't change it on the fly as it speaks, by either the +/- key or the volume knob (on the 7" vers), right? I tried, didn't seem to change it. Would be nice if you could change it "on the fly" instead of having to go through a bunch of menus and only change it in Settings..