• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 3, 2012

NBC's Summer Olympics are coming, and you might wonder how much commercial skipping will take place.  Probably very little, among some 115 million U.S. TV homes.

We all like to watch our sports live. That's the theory, anyway.

But some sports always seem to be on a kind of theoretical "delay" in the minds of consumers. This can be true when it comes to the Olympics. The Olympics -- alternating summer and winter games -- are in a different country every two years. That has meant different time zones and the dreaded "tape-delay" affixation. London is five hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast, eight hours ahead of the West Coast. 

But it is different this time around. NBC has made a big deal that its digital platforms will allow consumers to access all Olympics events live.  Of course, a newer tradition in the digital space is that you can never fast-forward through sports events even if you want to.

Right now, a small percentage of U.S. viewers time-shift sports programming. And even then it is usually only for a couple of minutes, to get a snack or whatever. Even fewer time shift by many hours or more.

Recently Dish Network has made a big deal about the AutoHop feature of its new Hopper DVR unit being able to automatically skip whole swaths of commercials in prime-time programming from the four U.S. broadcast networks. That means NBC viewers could choose to miss a lot of commercials that advertisers spent a lot of money to run during the Olympics.

If you are both an AMC fan and a Dish subscriber, the satellite distributor has also taken care of AMC’s commercials this summer – by blacking out the network of "Breaking Bad," "The Killing," "The Walking Dead" and "Mad Men" because of a carriage issue contract stalemate.

Commercial-skipping could be a big deal this summer -- but you have to know where to find the commercials to skip.