A remote is very akin to a wireless handset , it just offers mobility to control mechanism of the end point ( Phone/TV ).
Intelligence at the end points , in a TV network the end point is a remote control and not the TV itself.
The only simple request that a TV can handle is to change the channel number on the basis of external intermediation. Thus the remote control has to accurately issue this command based on the timing of the ad beginning and ad ending. Other cues that it can take is auditory or video perception ( recognition ) but then the remote control would become more complex than the TV itself.
( Intelligent end point with an intelligent and inflexible network what effect does it bring. Note that this is not an interactive network . It is a smart controlled inflexible broadcast network)
Build a remote control that can sense ads and switch channels on its own. ( Remote controls that can learn , put a learnability function like a neural network in it ). There is different cost to switching out than to switching in. If proper switching in not brought in correctly would lead to the total failure of the product.
Having said that I believe that systems with good predictive capability can be built even if we are dealing with stream based data. The reason is that there is no randomness in the stream , at most if psuedo randomness in introduced in the stream could be there as this stream is a man made stream and not a natural one.
A good technical excercise this would be but not sure if this would succeed as a technology as the underlying economics does not seem to work.
This remote control would only increase the transaction cost for the channel producer. Once this is wide spread and poses as a threat to the channel producer , he would spend more on dynamically programming the ads to beat the remote control , the remote control producers would retaliate by putting more advanced NN in it and this would lead to an arms race.
How the consumers would benefit by it. They would get the nuisance out of their sights. They were in a certain trance and were removed from that and then shown some useless stuff. so switch to something else which is more meaningful to the consumer.
Switching back should be very accurate and timely , switching back to the original from the new temporary channel would mean switching out from that which can have its own effect of switching out of desired something ( though this assumed to have less desirability , if that had not been the case then this would have been watched at the first place )