If you buy a high quality EPG data feed it will give you the start and stop times of each commercial slot. Cisco Videoscape does this to allow local affiliates to cut to local ads at the right time.
wow seems like this is something they should have investigated a bit before building so much heuristic and actually investing so much in the technology to detect commercials. I hope detecting ads is not the main part of their tech.
Modern digital TV has variable latency depending on the area and the method of transmission (cable, internet, DVB-T, etc), so you might be off by tens of seconds. Not sure whether it's a dealbreaker in this case.
