Personally, ads are easy enough for me to skip with a DVR (so long as you don't mind a lag between the live event and you watching it happen - avoiding results on the Internet isn't always easy) - but I don't even get the always-on thing. I had outages just as often as I do with Internet (actually more so), and I've had events not broadcasted when advertized. NBC Sports has been especially bad with this and F1 coverage - they outbid a motorsport-specific channel to get exclusive access to more niche events, and then those events get bumped to the bottom of the priority list in any scheduling conflict. So if you are DVR'ing it, you better check on it at least daily with other sources of information otherwise you're out of luck several times a season. Which wouldn't even be so bad if the only way to get NBC Sports and the other channels they move it to wasn't buying a 200 channel package and tripling my bill. So I just withdrew entirely.