Will You Subscribe to Commercial Skip?

To avoid raising the base TV Guide Data Subscription price for everyone, we have instead chosen to move Automatic Commercial Skipinto a new, and optional, Tablo Premium Service add-on starting February 6, 2020.

Pricing for the new optional Tablo Premium Service add-on will be as follows:

  • $2.00 USD ($3.00 CAD) per month on top of the monthly Tablo TV Guide Data subscription
  • $20.00 USD ($30.00 CAD) per year on top of the annual Tablo TV Guide Data subscription
  • $20.00 USD ($30.00 CAD) per year for lifetime Tablo TV Guide Data subscribers

Drop the annual price for those with lifetime subs and yes!

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No, I will not. It’s a cool feature, but I am fine just fast forwarding commercials on my own.

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I’d subscribe to lifetime TV Guide if it INCLUDED this.

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No; I turned mine off a few weeks ago because it failed too often.

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Probably not. It still fails too often and it routinely cuts off the tag on programs as well as any previews. FF with thumbnails works well enough for me.

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If it worked 100% or near 100% of the time, I would likely subscribe. It’s a really great feature when it works. However it rarely works, so I will not be subscribing.

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Me too. I turned it off also, a few weeks ago. I would pay for upgraded hardware though… and I would definitely pay for a comskip like Tivo has… something that does not require upload to their servers, and something that is not automatic.

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I am new here and just recently bought a lifetime subscription. I thought the commercial skip was part of the subscription! Now I am asked to pay an additional MONTHLY fee. I feel like this has been a bait and switch. Now I am sure this is covered legally in the TOS I agreed to, but I am nonetheless very unhappy. I had confidence in the company or I wouldn’t have purchased a lifetime sub…now this, ugh.

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No! 20.00 a year isn’t bad. It’s 19.99 higher than it’s worth. Might be worth 50 if it worked. Seems to work best during prime time. I only record sports and special events during prime time. I don’t usually wait until the next day to watch those. So it doesn’t work for me.

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Works pretty well for me (when it works). Sure, reception or other (?) mystery problems cause the skip processing to fail, but when it works, it seems to work pretty well. $20/yr.? Might be worth it.

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I believe I will sub. $20 a year is not an unreasonable price and for me the service has been fairly reliable. It’s not perfect, especially on my local ION station, but it is good enough for the time being and I expect it will get better as time goes on.

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I deactivated it a month or two ago due to the required internet upload bandwidth…

If they gave me the ability to schedule the upload time for the middle of the night, I would most likely subscribe.

Would still appreciate a bit of a discount for those with lifetime but $20 / year really isn’t too bad IMO.

FYI - That’s still something I’m lobbying for internally.

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@TabloTV I suspect you will not reveal this…I’ll ask anyways. What level of buy-in do you guys need to keep the service going? The rationale for the charge is because “cloud computing costs money” so if you do not get the buy-in from the required number of your customer base will you terminate the service?

If you terminate the service within x-period of time will people get a pro-rata refund?

I’m leaning towards “No”, it just doesn’t feel “fully baked” enough to pay for just yet? The Tablo my parents are using will require discussion in coming days?

Main issue on their Tablo re: Commercial skip is that it fails to properly process/skip on her daily soap, constantly? Commercial skip frequently skips an entire segment of the show?Other shows just seem to occasionally clip the last 5sec of a segment of a show before the commercial starts, and occasionally the skip seems to cut off the first 1-3sec after a commercial break? Catch characters mid-word? I’d asked them to email support when they mentioned this, as they’d already deleted the affected recordings before I was there to look? Not sure if they did though?

I’m not sure if I’ll subscribe. It is too expensive for something that does not work 100% (or near 100%) of the time. To me it still feels like beta (sorry tablo!).

I’d also like the show to process the CS faster than 2 hours after the show ends. Scrubbing seems to happen in less than an hour and CS seems to take two hours. Too long for $20 / year.

If CS worked near 100% and CS happen in ½ the time, then it would be worth $20 / year.

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I think they’re being too fancy with the machine learning.

A crowd-sourced method would require minimum resources and I bet it would be more accurate. You know the channel and date/time of the recording, you know when when users start/stop fast forwarding. Tablo could report back these times to detect commercials.

If 50 people in Austin, TX are watching the Tuesday 10:30PM CTS showing of The Tonight Show, and they start fast forwarding “around” 14min 18sec and stop FF “around” 15min 20sec, then that’s likely where the commercials are. When the 51st person starts watching the same show, Tablo could automatically start/stop FF starting those times.

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So Canadians now have to pay a 50% premium over the U.S.$!! And I thought the usual 25% - 30% premium was bad enough.

The worst part is … this is a Canadian company doing this to Canadians.

Wouldn’t $20USD and $25CDN$ be closer to what it should be?

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No, still seems too error prone and limited.