If you take away my fast forward button I won't buy your equipment. If worse comes to worse, I'll just go back to recording on DVDs or even (shudder) video tapes so I can continue fast forwarding.
One response by the networks is producing shows like Treasure Product Placement Hunters where they make sure to get their hints on Motorolla Razor phones, look up information on Ask.com and schedule their flights on Orbitz - continually. I think the show is just a warning on how bad things will get if everyone skips commercials.
One other thing I can see is instead of having 10 minutes of show followed by 5 minutes of commercials, going to 2 minutes of show and 15-30 seconds of commercials so you are likely to watch more of it before you hit the fast forward button and are more likely to catch some of it when getting back to the show.
Your last suggestion has some merit. I know that one of the reasons I FF is that 4-7 minutes of commercials bore me to tears. What the networks need to consider is that if they force us to sit through those long blocks of commercials, a lot of us will just turn off the teevee and go do something else. Most teevee shows are just not good enough to endure so many commercials!
I wonder how much the brand name octane booster company paid the net for this "feature"?
The do that with some long movies.
It way too annoying and screws up the continuity of story.
The bottom line is commericial based television's days are numbered.
Perhaps pay TV will finally be the commercial free nirvana that was the original promise.
Product placements and segment sponsorships (all sports fans are infinitely familiar with segment sponsorship) are the wave of the commercial future. In some ways it's a good thing, as the industry gets better at those and stops having to sell as many commercials and the ammount of time a show is on will increase, imagine a one hour show actually being an hour somewhere other than HBO. Of course it's often very cheesy, they need to dig up some of the old TV executives from the live days, they knew how to do product placement smoothly.