Why Time Skipping or “Skip” Cannot Be Reliably Remote or Voice Controlled in Bed
The Core Limitation and Innovation: Touch-Based UI Without System Controls
This article describes the core innovation of SemiPremium which enables true touch and therefore light free operation of smartphones. This patent-pending technology greatly reduces or eliminates the harm of smartphone use in bed for entertainment purposes.
What many people know and more people are learning is how their sleep health is directly influences by their relation to light and how light both triggers effects in the body to wake one up or go to sleep. Smartphone use in bed is widespread, and for each interaction with a touchscreen forcing unavoidable light in the eye becomes increasingly problematic depending on the time span between the last interaction and when the person falls asleep. Melatonin secretion is directly influenced by either presence or absence of light, and when falling asleep, the levels should be as high as possible with no light entering the eyes before waking up, preferably in a pitch black dark room. So called sleep pressure is built up during the day, being adenosine and is felt as tiredness, and when melatonin levels rise, most people fall asleep naturally.
Before SemiPremium, the smartphone could be used with a remote control, but only for essential controls. When using a smartphone for bedtime entertainment, being video content on YouTube, and audio book, a podcast or white noise, the way the person or company makes money on their content, is to interrupt the content with messaging, often combined with distribution platform ads which is the price a non-Premium subscriber pays for access to the content. It is unpredictable and intermittent, it changes constantly, and without the possibility to touch tap, a remote could only be used to skip tracks in some apps and controlling volume. In fact, the topology of this mixed media landscape with a centralized distribution platform with decentralized content providers creates a hybrid ad model, where there are both hard interruptions of the content and interruptions embedded in the content itself, requiring more than a Premium subscription to control. In most cases, having a dedicated HID consumer control usage table code for "Skip ad" and "Time skip ahead", would solve the problem, but that does not exist with little to no incentive to include it. After all, it would hurt the business models for both the distribution platform and content creators and none of the stakeholders are decision makers in the USB Implementers Forum. That is old big tech, not neo big tech.
SemiPremium in essence works while connected to smartphones and tablets through what can be described as a HID/UI "hack", in lack of a better word, or "correction" or "update" as we say, using a combination based on the mouse or pointer, creating effects only available through a keyboard to trigger commands belonging as so called consumer controls, which is the HID menu for all the media controls. That is what is required to interact with the lock screen widget of any background entertainment app on the market.
Click here to go to the product demonstration page.
The word hack has been misinterpreted, and doesn't mean a person dressing in a black hoodie in a dark room with green text rolling through multiple screens, while showing off typing efficiency and author would be envious of without a single typo (ever), with no mouse, and "hack" being the activity working on gaining illegal access to systems they should by law, morals and ethics only access through the front door. The work hack essentially means using a tool or a system for something it was not designed to do.
Modern media applications rely on touch-based UI objects that have no corresponding Human Interface Device (HID) control codes and no universally exposed system commands. This is the fundamental technical limitation on which the SemiPremium product is based.
The HID usage tables is a standardized al la carte menu where device manufacturers can pick and choose what each button, knob, fader or wheel will do once interacted with.
HID is the most complete and interoperable standard for physical remote control over both cable (USB) and wireless (Bluetooth / BLE). However, it supports only a fixed, legacy-defined set of multimedia actions: play, pause, stop, next, previous, fast forward, and rewind. These controls were designed for physical and early digital media—not for modern, touch-first user interfaces.
As a result, any control that exists purely as a UI object—such as “Skip 10 seconds,” “Skip Ad,” or “Skip Intro”—cannot be triggered by HID, because no standardized control primitive exists to represent those actions.
Playback Controls Have Not Kept Up With GUI Evolution
Physical playback controls evolved alongside physical media:
- Vinyl required only play and stop.
- Cassette tapes introduced fast forward and rewind.
- Compact Discs added track skipping, repeat, and shuffle.
These controls still define the HID multimedia key set used today.
However, modern media consumption—streaming video, podcasts, audiobooks—no longer operates on physical tracks or linear scrubbing alone. Instead, GUIs now expose context-aware, time-based actions:
- Skip forward/backward 10–30 seconds
- Skip intro
- Skip recap
- Skip ad
Playback Controls vs. Modern Media UX Incremental time skipping has become the dominant interaction model for:
- Podcasts and audiobooks (±10–30 seconds)
- Streaming video platforms
- Background entertainment consumed with the screen off or device out of reach
This shift occurred because continuous fast forward and rewind are inefficient for streamed media, consume unnecessary bandwidth, and provide poor positional accuracy.
Graphical interfaces adapted accordingly. Physical control standards did not.
YouTube, Netflix, and Temporary Skip Buttons Applications such as YouTube and Netflix make the limitation explicit.
Buttons like:
- Skip Ad
- Skip Intro
- Skip Recap
are:
- Temporary
- Context-dependent
- Implemented purely as touch targets
- Not part of any system-level media control API
There is no HID code, no OS-level command, and no generic interface for activating these buttons. As a result, no physical remote, keyboard, or standard media controller can trigger them.
Fast forward is not a substitute—it is often disabled during ads and is intentionally imprecise compared to discrete skip actions.
Why Voice Assistants Fail for the Same Reason For the same underlying reason, voice assistants are not a viable solution either.
Voice assistants do not interact with the screen directly. They rely on:
- The same standardized system media commands as HID, or
- App-specific voice intents, when explicitly implemented by the app developer.
Since skip actions are UI-defined and not standardized, they are typically:
- Not exposed as voice intents
- Inaccessible on the lockscreen
- Unavailable when the device is idle or the screen is off
- Inconsistent across apps and platforms
Temporary UI elements such as “Skip Ad” or “Skip Intro” are almost never voice-accessible, because they exist only momentarily and are tightly coupled to application state.
If an action cannot be expressed as a system command, it cannot be reliably triggered by voice.
This places physical remotes and voice assistants under the same limitation: both are constrained to legacy media controls that modern apps no longer use.
Why This Has Not Been Standardized The HID standard is governed by organizations such as the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), whose priorities are stability, backward compatibility, and broad interoperability. Their historical focus is desktop computing and traditional peripherals—not fine-grained interaction with touch-based streaming interfaces.
Introducing new HID usages for granular, time-based, or context-aware actions is complex, especially over HID over GATT, where packet size constraints, report descriptor complexity, and fragile service initialization already make robust cross-platform devices difficult to build.
There is also little incentive to standardize controls that could facilitate ad skipping or disrupt established content delivery and monetization models.
The Resulting Dead End This creates a hard technical boundary:
- HID cannot trigger touch-only UI elements
- Voice assistants depend on the same system abstractions
- Applications do not expose these controls generically
Therefore: Time skipping and skip buttons cannot be reliably controlled by hardware or voice.
Why SemiPremium Is the Only Viable Solution The SemiPremium remote does not attempt to extend HID or rely on voice control. Read more about SemiPremium here.
Instead, it uses patent-pending pointer control technology to perform touch tap emulation on the actual on-screen UI elements themselves.
When a user presses a button on the SemiPremium remote, the device:
- Moves a pointer
- Targets the visible skip control
- Activates it as if the screen were physically touched
This allows SemiPremium to control:
- Podcast skip buttons on the lockscreen
- YouTube “Skip Ad”
- Netflix “Skip Intro”
- Any touch-based media control
…without requiring the user to touch the device.
Conclusion Because modern skip controls exist only as touch-based UI objects, they cannot be controlled by HID, physical remotes, or voice assistants. This leaves a single viable approach for touch-free operation of background entertainment—especially in and out of bed:
If there were HID multimedia key codes for skipping ads or time skipping, SemiPremium would have already existed in a different form factor from another company, as a product enabling a touch-free experience and not just the essential, but the complete control of background entertainment on smartphones and tablets.
Direct interaction with the UI itself through touch tap emulation using the underutilized pointer input device native in both iOS and Android.
That is the problem SemiPremium is designed to solve.
Explore more in the Sleep Onset Toolbox for additional insights into bedtime tech that supports natural sleep without disruption.