TiVo BOLT Joins The DISH Hopper In Letting You Skip Commercials

All about speed

The new TiVo 4K “BOLT” DVR claims to be all about speed, helping to get to their shows quicker, and offering several features to watch them quickly as well.

SkipMode

No one likes commercials, and with Netflix and similar streaming services some of us are not even used to them anymore. To avoid them, TiVo is offering a feature called SkipMode on the BOLT.

SkipMode will enable users to skip entire commercial breaks on “certain” recorded shows. They don’t say which shows those “certain” ones are.

According to TiVo, SkipMode feature breakthrough and that distinguishes BOLT from everything else, we suspect that DISH might disagree with them, given that their Hopper DVRs have had a similar feature called AutoHop for a few years now, but SkipMode is still a very cool feature to offer.

QuickMode

Have you ever found yourself thinking “boy, this sitcom is great but 22 minutes is just too long, I wish I could watch it in 15 instead!” if you have (you’re weird, but also) you’re in luck!

QuickMode let’s the viewer speed up the show by 30% while maintaining the audio quality. It’s admittedly impressive, however, we suspect it may not actually save you anywhere near “up to a month of your life” a year, like TiVo claims.

Streaming and OTA

The BOLT can play shows from streaming media sources, and it’s capable of recording over-the-air TV, in an attempt to capture newer generation viewers.