I read in the news paper that TV networks just paid a few billion dollars to NFL for the rights to broadcast NFL games on their network. One of the reasons why they are willing to pay exorbitant money for broadcasting these games is that no one watches them with TiVo to skip the commercials. To the fans watching a game that is not live is less appealing than watching it commercial free. So they put up with the commercials to have a sense community and belonging with the other fans that are watching the game at the same time as them.
So my idea is for some software on your digital video recorder to cut out all the commercials in the live stream and replace them with segments of a movie or another pre-recorded show. © ;-) With this you can even watch 2 football games at the same time since a 3hr football came has less than 1.5 hours of actual content.
Human brain is fairly apt at following a movie along even if it is segmented into 3 min chunks. The software will take care of recognizing commercial interruptions and do the hard work of playing the pausing the movie. Perhaps it could even re-play the last 15 seconds of the movie so that you remember where it was left off.
I am sitting in Edmonton airport and thought about this idea. Thanks to the free internet provided by Bell Canada and Air Canada.