No Commercials, Please

As a happy TiVo owner, I wish to respond to one thing in Christine Rosen’s Dec. 7 commentary, “Fast-Forward to Passivity,” about TiVo’s plans to flash advertisements to those fast-forwarding through commercials. She states, “ ... you can fast-forward through recorded commercials but not skip them entirely.” Not quite true. There is a fairly simple software fix that reprograms your remote control for a 30-second skip (the length of many TV commercials), and I’m sure this will be of value to many people when TiVo institutes its drive-by advertising plan, so I’d like to pass it on.

This sequence will reprogram the tiny button used by TiVo owners to jump a paused live program to real time so it will do a 30-second forward skip instead: (1) Press the Select button. (2) Press the Play button. (3) Press the Select button. (4) Press the number “3,” then the number “0.” (5) Press the Select button.

Sherry Gottlieb

Oxnard