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This reminds me of an Arduino project I started but never finished! I bought an IR LED and made a dumb TV remote webapp that could change the volume and channels and mute the TV and had the mute time be 30 configurable. The Arduino just sat on my coffee table pointing at the TV and was connected to my wifi.

I ultimately wanted to detect how loud my TV was and lower the volume automatically when I watched Avengers or something because I was constantly fiddling with the volume when some parts were excessively loud. I wanted to extend this to ads too so that when they came on my TV would mute automatically but I got the microphone and kinda lost passion for the project.

I've always thought that a button to "blur" the video and audio (the latter using a low-pass filter or similar) would be a more effective way of doing this. You can still infer enough detail from the video and audio to know when the ads are over, but you wouldn't subject yourself to the higher-frequency, information-dense content of those ads.

mainly to get around watching ads

This is probably precisely why this feature won't find its way into a lot of new smart tvs