I signed up for commercial skip. The only programs I was really interested in using it for (NBC national evening news and NBC local news) are marked as “ineligible”. Am I doing something wrong or is this a waste of a few $/month for me?
https://www.tablotv.com/tablo-premium-service/#automatic-commercial-skip-supported-devices-details7
You’re not doing any of this…
In order to be eligible for commercial skip processing, your Tablo DVR’s recordings must:
- NOT be a Cloud DVR recording
Only recordings made on a Tablo’s internal or hard drive storage are currently supported.- NOT be a manual recording
Manual recordings lack ‘program type’ details and therefore are ineligible- Be completed successfully
In-progress, failed, and incomplete recordings are ineligible.- Be created AFTER commercial skip has been enabled in your Tablo’s settings screen
- Have completed Fast-Forward Preview processing successfully
I was told that certain shows like the one below are “black-listed” from commercial skip processing because they are not easily processed and until a process is found to handle them they will not be eligible even though it meets the published criteria.
Not sure of the criteria for “not easily processed” is because until the last couple of revisions of comskip this show was adequately processed. Not sure how it got put on the black-list or if there a plan to remove from the list in the future. It’s been at least a couple of months and this show still is ineligible.
It seems to me that this is a method to reduce the server time to process difficult shows and save costs. Also it may be that only the more watched shows are processed more reliably, since they only need to process one-time and replicate the comskip info and distribute to the same recordings on other tablos. Just waiting for the new TV season to start to see if the new episodes of prime time shows fair better.
Just wondering was there a time in prior revisions of comskip that it seemed to work better for folks?
“I was told”… They could have pointed out a documented list of Filtered Recordings… https://www.tablotv.com/tablo-premium-service/#automatic-commercial-skip-supported-devices-details8
Certain networks, program types, and shows are always ineligible for commercial skip processing including:
- [NETWORK] PBS
- [NETWORK] TVO
- [PROGRAM TYPE] Manual Recording
- [SHOW] The Saint
- [SHOW] The Green Hornet
- [SHOW] Laramie
- [SHOW] Have Gun - Will Travel
- [SHOW] The Burns & Allen Show
- [SHOW] Bonanza
- [SHOW] Gilligans Island
- [SHOW] Dragnet
- [SHOW] Leave it to Beaver
- [SHOW] Alfred Hitchcock
- [SHOW] Tales of Wells Fargo
- [SHOW] The Twilight Zone
- [SHOW] Good Morning America
I don’t believe they use discriminatory term ineligible for filtered shows.
‘Master’ and ‘slave’: Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
The terms “master” and “slave,” used to describe the relationships between two computer hard drives and or between two camera flashes, have come under scrutiny because of their association with America’s history of slavery. Similarly, “whitelist” and “blacklist,” terms for allowing and denying access to a service, are being revisited because of their potentially racial overtones.
Words matter 
The only news programs currently ineligible for Automatic Commercial Skip are Today, Dateline NBC, and Good Morning America.
Those shows should show the error message: Program ineligible for Commercial Skip.
It is possible that you might see another error message on NBC Evening News or your local news, but it wouldn’t be due to ineligibility.
You can see a full list of error messages here:
We have seen national and local news recordings be rejected or fail processing for having fewer than the expected number of commercial breaks. This can happen if a large portion of the newscast is a cut-in from a press conference etc. But you would see a different message than ineligible.
Is that not the case?
We do keep an eye on the success/failure rate of specific shows when it comes to being processed for commercial skip.
Shows can and will be placed on the ineligible list if we see a large number of them are failing processing because we want to ensure people have a good experience with the feature.
For example, we added some late night talk shows to the ineligible list when they switched to production from home as this was throwing off the algorithms. Now that they’re slowly returning to in-studio production, we’ll do some testing and hopefully remove them from the list so they can be processed again.
It’s not about server time or costs … it’s about experience.
Shows that are currently on the ineligible list objectively weren’t providing a good experience for the majority of users.
Many of these are older programs broadcast on subchannels. Sometimes the programs are broadcast with a normal number of commercials of normal length.
However, often these programs have very odd commercial timings… For example one REALLY LONG commercial right in the middle… Or the commercial segments are inserted into random spots in the show versus where you’d expect the commercials to be placed.
This can throw off the algorithms as well.
We are slowly working to make ‘custom recipes’ for these shows so we can remove them from the ineligible list. We are focusing on the shows that are most popular first however… During the last update for example, we added Star Trek and it seems to be doing much better.
It’s possible that the network you watch Black Sheep Squadron on had a more ‘normal’ set of commercials but elsewhere it was likely failing fairly regularly to have been added to the ‘no no’ list.