Its worth investigating the increased use of Subaudible tones to demarcate commercials. These subaudibles are originally intended to be captured by your phones and tablets in order to allow the company to track you across multiple devices through their microphones. the tones are also used to detect commercial ad presence for analytics companies or suites used by advertisers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaudible_tone

One could use these tones to 'detect' a commercial and avoid it, or strip out these tones entirely to promote operational security amongst devices.