AI could come to help: a powerful enough dedicated hardware could decode HDMI signals, match the audio/video with the known fingerprint of an ad, substitute it with say a tropical beach or some mountains with a soft jazz music background and a small countdown in a corner "ads end in: mm:ss", then resume the program at the predicted end. The fingerprint would be taken by the users by pushing a button to mark each spot start and end so that the AI can recognize it and upload to a central server that would aggregate all data. The system should have a buffer long enough to allow watchers to rewind to the exact start and end of the spot, and to allow the AI to analyze the data before showing it to the watchers, however a very long buffer could be even more handy to wait for the entire program to end, then process it so that every ad is removed and the program joined back together with no interruptions. Doable? Yes, but would need a lot of work and some money for the hardware. Probably also overkill since pretty much all programs are already available ads free on decentralized torrent swarms.