They have the ability to do that, but I have never seen it actually happen, in the years that I’ve owned Tivos. However, I don’t watch sports. The closest that I’ve seen was that I recently downloaded some music videos onto my Tivo from the Internet, and one of them was flagged to delete itself after a month.
Seconded. In years of Tivoing, the only copy protection I’ve seen is that programs downloaded off premium channels (HBO/Showtime, etc.) can’t be uploaded to a computer. I don’t watch a lot of (well, any) sports, but I record for people who do, and it’s never happened to me.
I vaguely remember something getting the “delete in a month” setting, but unless you lock shows down or don’t use your Tivo much (especially for HD programming), most things won’t last a month on it anyway.
From the TiVo support pages:
Questions about copy protection.