TiVo has the notion of a Season Pass, where you just tell it you’re interested in a show and the TiVo will grab it for you when it’s available. It’s sufficiently flexible that you can ask for all new episodes, or just to keep at most one copy of the latest airing (which is what I do with BBC News). One VAD service I’d like would be a season pass to an episodic show you want to watch from the start: you tell your PVR about it, and it downloads the first show, whether it be the classic black-and-white Addams Family or that new series your friends are raving about that isn’t in reruns yet. That can hover on your PVR for however long it takes you to get to it; as soon as you finish watching the first episode and delete it, it downloads another one. You could easily go through one episode a day this way without requiring unreasonable amounts of bandwidth. If the show is currently running, a really smart such season pass would automatically cut over to new episodes as soon as you catch up, and could go back and download the most recent episode if your cable provider had a problem and the show didn’t record.

You could even have a variety of pricing models for such a service: you could get it for free with targeted ads inserted in the commercial breaks, or make it profitable for the hosting company to send it to you ad-free.