Why do most PVRs, such as Telstra's T-Box, offer half-arsed Season Pass features?

A Season Pass lets you program your Personal Video Recorder to automatically record your favourite shows each week. The best PVRs check the schedule for changes, rather than blindly recording the same time slot. I'd say the Season Pass is probably the most critical feature of any PVR.

When it comes to off-the-shelf PVRs, TiVo sets the bar pretty high with regard to Season Passes. The reason why is that a TiVo lets you specify how many episodes to keep, so the hard drive doesn't fill up. If it's a show you want to hang on to, you can tell the TiVo to keep every episode until you manually delete them.

Most other PVRs lack an auto-delete option, so your hard drive fills up unless you remember to do a manual cull every week or so. You generally don't realise the hard drive is full until it's too late and you've missed your favourite show or, worse yet, missed your better-half's favourite show.

Telstra's new T-Box PVR goes to the other extreme, with a hard-wired auto-delete feature that you can't edit. The T-Box only holds about 100 hours of SD or 30 hours of HD recordings. When it's full, it just starts deleting old recordings. There's no way to nominate which shows to keep. There's no way to tell it that you want to keep as many episodes of Glee as possible, while deleting Letterman each night to make way for another episode. There's no way to tell it you want to keep the World Cup final for a few weeks, but not keep every stage of the Tour de France.

UPDATE: After testing the T-Box for a few days, I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Telstra's T-Box expert yesterday to ensure I understood its advanced features. What I wrote above (now struck out) is EXACTLY what I was told over the phone. After reading this post, Telstra's PR team rang to say I'm wrong - the auto-delete options are related to rented movies. That's NOT what I was told on the phone. Obviously such a feature is difficult to test in day or two, so I was stupid enough to think that Telstra might fking understand its own product.

Now I'm told the T-Box's PVR function does NOT include an auto-delete feature. It just keeps filling up, like most other half-arsed PVRs. It warns you when you hit 90 percent capacity, which means you've got room for roughly another three hours of HD content. If it hits 100 percent, it just stops recording shows until you manually delete something. So the T-Box is still a piece of crap, it's just crap in the same way as most other so-called PVRs. Save your money and get a TiVo or Foxtel iQ2.

You can manually copy recordings you want to keep across to a USB device. Recordings archived to USB can only be viewed on the T-Box, not other devices.

The T-Box looks impressive at first glance but, if you've got a house full of TV watchers, Telstra's new PVR looks like it could put a serious dint in your WAF.