An App That Tells you when the Commercials are over

You know how it goes down...you're watching on of your favorite shows and it goes to a commercial break. 

You use the down time to jump on the computer in the other room and check your email. Next thing you know, you get caught up with something on the computer and you miss a big portion of your show. 

Well a new app might be able to help you out. 

The App Commercial Break was designed to do just that. 

Commercial Break, the app that alerts viewers in real time when their TV program comes back from commercials, today announces a public beta starting in New York City. The app, which uses Digital Signal Processing to automatically distinguish between TV advertisements and programs, is now available on 10 channels accessible to New York City residents: ABC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, ESPN2, FOX, NBC, TNT, TBS, USA.

Commercial Break is available on Apple's App Store free of charge during its public beta. "The average American sees more than ten hours of commercials every week. Commercial Break is two Israelis' attempt to help them take back that time," said Commercial Break cofounder and CEO Haim Kairy. "The idea came to me after channel-surfing one day: I realized that my cofounder, Eli Ben David, and I could apply our backgrounds in engineering and sound production to automate the tedious channel-flipping that we all do while waiting for our program to come back from commercials."

Commercial Break's unique algorithms identify the end of commercial breaks by analyzing dozens of cues from audio and video signals, 40 times per second. To use the app, viewers simply select the channel they're watching to start getting instant alerts when commercials end.

After its public beta, the company plans to expand to additional US cities and make the app available for Android.