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Comment by flowrange | Hacker News Reader

Here in France, some Internet+television providers have started implementing a new rule : you can't skip commercials on recorded shows.

It was entirely dictated by TV channels, in order to close the obvious "recording loophole" : instead of watching the show in their VOD app, you could record it, and obviously skip all commercials.

Now you can't anymore. There's even a small dialog when you try that tells you that "Due to a specific demand by <TV Channel>, skipping is a disabled feature."

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The correct response should be to actively disregard all IP owned by corporations participating in that behavior.

I don't listen to podcasts with ads, but my wife does, and I was in a car ride with her a couple of weeks ago, and she demonstrated something that I hadn't known about even though it's trivial. Her fast forward button skipped forward 30 seconds, and her rewind button skipped back 10 seconds. So it allowed her to skip forward by 30 second increments until she got to content, and then skip back by 10 seconds until she got to the break. I'm sure this is well known by everyone, but it seems to be a generic enough algorithm that France would have trouble banning it. Is it that France is banning the skip commercial functionality or they're literally preventing video players from skipping forward by 30 seconds? Seems draconian if it's the latter, but then again, I was blown away by how La Liga has been the tail wagging the internet dog lately.

I'm inferring that "banning skipping commercials" is a restriction on the part of the service provider, not on the part of France's legislature

That is the exact reason spotify only allows 15 second skips both ways.

In Switzerland there's another solution: the streaming providers (Sunrise, Teleboy) insert their own ads if you choose to skip the channel ads. To be fair, Teleboy offers also a more expensive tier without ads at all, but like other commenters said, I reckon that public is gonna be milked more and more.

In Portugal, the providers were fined for showing ads in recordings and ordered to stop.

Call up cable tv provuder and say" due to a specific demand by me, i am cancelling my tv service." Then use the time you would have watched tv to lobby to red&ce copyright back to the original 14 years where it probably belonged.

Solution—don’t watch TV

Or use tvheadend + comskip

I suppose you could walk away to grab a snack or bathroom break during a commercial like in the old days but then I assume we will accelerate our path to drinking the verification can.

Reference for those who don’t know the meme

https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF

> Here in France, some Internet+television providers have started implementing a new rule : you can't skip commercials on recorded shows.

Wait until you hear of the extended version of this: Some longer whole day live sports on Dutch RTL (and others, it's catching on) have the option for playback but you have to watch from the start and cannot fast forwards in any way. Want to watch the last match? You need to pay more or play several hours of ad ridden TV first!

They are just m3u8 files so extract that, drop it in VLC and you are fine. But 99.9% of the populance will never be able to do that.

HD+ is 17 years old already (German hd broadcast for private channels). One of its features were no skipping commercials in your own recordings.

I don't understand, how is this possibly implemented?

Sweden

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