Tablo and deleting recordings

I love Tablo. It's a great way to watch over the air TV.

Tablo is a DVR system, but the network-connected devices also allow you to watch live over the air TV on any TV connected to your network. And, to tell the truth, I use Tablo that way more than I do with recordings.

Many do use it for recordings, however. And there is one thing about Tablo that can cause problems with recordings. That's deleting the recordings.

Sometimes, you want to protect a recording from deletion. This is something that some DVRs offer. Tablo, however, doesn't let you protect individual recordings, though they do allow protection of recordings. It's just the way they go about it that is a little unusual.

In a recent Q&A, Tablo addressed the issue:

While Tablo DVRs don't have a 'recycle bin' or 'undelete' option, they do have a feature called 'protect'.

Within the RECORDINGS screen of all Tablo apps, when you select a specific program you'll see a PROTECT option. On most platforms this will disable the DELETE button on the recording, requiring a user to UNPROTECT the recording before being able to delete it.

Not having a recycle bin makes it impossible to recover an accidental recording, and protecting all recordings in a series makes it problematic if you want to erase a recording after you watch it. In other words, the most likely scenarios are the very ones for which they did not account.

I still am a fan of Tablo. But if they were to fix this obvious system design flaw, it would make everyone's Streaming Life better.