Advertisement breaks dunng or between television programmes are typically flagged by senes of black-and-silent video frames, which recurrendy occur in order to audio-visually separate individual advertisement spots from one another. It is the regular prevalence of these flags that enables automatic differentiauon between what is programme content and what is advertisement break. Detection of these audio-visual depressions within broadcast television content provides a basis on which advertisement detection may be achieved. This document reports on the progress made in the development of this idea into an advertisement detector system that automatically detects the advertisement breaks direcdy from the MPEG-1 encoded bitstream of digitally captured television broadcasts.