After the video cassette recorder (VCR) became popular in the 1980s, the television industry began studying the impact of users fast forwarding through commercials.
In 2002, the main television networks and movie studios sued ReplayTV,[3] claiming that skipping advertisements during replay violates copyright.
Later, five owners of ReplayTV represented by Electronic Frontier Foundation and attorneys Ira Rothken and Richard Wiebe countersued, asking the federal judge to uphold consumers' rights to record TV shows and skip commercials, claiming that features like commercial skipping help parents protect their kids from excessive consumerism.
By 2014, many DVR programs such as Windows Media Center, SageTV and MythTV had the capability to skip commercials segments in recorded TV broadcasts after installing third-party add-ons such as DVRMSToolbox, Comskip and ShowAnalyzer, which use various advanced techniques to locate the commercial segments in the video files and save their locations to text files.
Streaming services such as Hulu show shorter advertisements with a countdown timer and tailored to the viewers interests, asking interactive questions like "Is this ad relevant to you?