Do they get to decide what is more important for you to keep? At least with the Sky box, the ability to remote delete is only really used if licensing expires or some other extraordinary circumstance – otherwise it’s a physical hard drive sitting in your box, if you want to fill it with 2,000 recordings of the same Two and a Half men episode over and over again – nothing’s stopping you, except maybe taste and/or sanity.

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A “few” (15) years ago, I built a Media Center PC (remember those?).
In fact, my wife and I used one as our daily viewing platform for around a decade. It was capable of doing both UHF Freeview (HD), Satellite Freeview via a DVB-S card and Sky using a capture card and IR blaster to automate channel changes on the set-top-box. While this worked for our use cases, our viewing habits started shifting more toward the Sky channels and away from Freeview.
This started when complete drivel managed to take over the airwaves to appeal to the masses – I cannot stand manufactured tension from the likes of Masterchef and cannot fathom the need to run Popstars over multiple nights in a week (other than the fact that it’s cheaply made and broadly appealing to the ever-dimming masses - why would you bother with licensing scripted drama if those are the economics you’re dealing with?).

After tinkering and improving constantly, I finally managed to put together a machine that could archive all Freeview channels at once (although HDD space limitations meant we kept that to recording what we wanted to watch if we were out).