Never owned a TiVo, but I just looked up what skipmode is, and I thought that was the whole point of a TiVo.
Like, it has always been advertised as record shows and skip commercials. When they said skip commercials in the early 2000s, did they just mean fast forward?
there's a 30 second skip button, and also the fast forward button is really well tuned so you watch for the end of the commercial break, hit play, it jumps back a few seconds to where you couldn't react fact enough. It all worked very well somehow.