Recording television programs for future playback by enabling the user to record a plurality of programs that have sequential units of commercial content. There is sequential sensing for commercial content units. When a commercial content unit is reached, it is removed for separate storage. A determination is made as to whether the removed commercial content unit is the same as a previous commercial content unit that has been removed. Any previous commercial unit that has been removed has been stored in a file and a pointer to the file inserted in place of the commercial in the sequential stream of the television program being recorded. Thus, if the removed commercial unit has the same content, i.e. is a repeat of a previous commercial, the inserted pointer will point to the file of the previous commercial.