Overview of the TiVo Service Architecture

There is video of a seminar given by TiVo co-founder Jim Barton at UC Berkeley that looks interesting… It is 90 minutes, so I will have to watch it when I get home tonight (or soon). If you are interested, head over here.

10 thoughts on “Overview of the TiVo Service Architecture

  1. Interesting facts gleaned from this (its mostly stuff you know)

  2. 150k tivos download 5.1tb of data per day
  3. 4.5 petabytes (10^15) of disk space on tivos around the world
  4. 90% of viewers skip 100% of commercials
  5. tivos on average tape 2 shows a day
    1. I wonder if they do any kind of edge caching in the UUNet POPs (which the TiVo’s dial into) to do a better job of distributing the bandwidth usage… It seems like a lot of unnecessary traffic that could be dealt with at the POP level.

      1. well one thing i dont get is this.

        if theres 150,000 tivos, and 5.1tb of data per day, thats ~35mb per tivo?? that CAN’T be right, even during a major software update, tivo doesnt take more than an hour to download an entire software upgrade and tv guide data, and i know that the average guide data isnt more than a few megs compressed (it comes down the pipe as encrypted gzips)…

        i dunno if they based their # on uncompressed data or what..

        1. This is true… It sounds rather fishy.. :)

          Did you hear that in v3 of the TiVo software that it will start getting some of it’s data from TV programming? Apparently they have worked out deals with local stations to start transmitting data to the TiVo late night using the VBI (vertical blank interval)…

          1. yeah, i had heard that, its about time. if they can pay to broadcast that stupid tivo show on encore, they can smoosh the damn tv listings in there so i dont have to run the serial cable up the stairs to my PC so often ;)

            i SO need to buy turbonet, but im lazy. herm.. maybe i will just make the plunge today..

            the sound on this feed sucks, and the info is sort of outdated (they were just pushing v2.0 of the software out the day he was speaking), but he did foreshadow about the v2 tivos, and VBR encoding in 2.5.x

            i wonder when i’m gonna get 3.0, i only really plug my tivo in once a week and force a daily call cuz i hate tripping over my 50 foot serial cable heh.

            1. I am very happy with my TurboNet card… Well worth the money! It is nice doing a download in a few seconds… :)

              I haven’t gotten 3.0 yet either, and I am sure that when I do I am going to have to haul my TiVo back up stairs to “re-hack” it… :)

          2. The DTivos get their programming data from DirecTV’s program guide already for the stuff within about 3 days, and a nightly download over the satellite for the 2 week data. The only thing they use the phone for is to check your subscription status and download new versions of the software. (Which I’m not sure why they don’t push the new software over the dish too, but they don’t.)

  6. well maybe, maybe not. im not sure if you heard or not, but supposedly 3.0 comes WITH the kernel modules for the popular network cards people have hacked in, as well as dhcp capability.

    thats what i read on the interweb..

    1. Yeah, I figured it would be a problem because I didn’t have a DHCP server on my network, but I sat down and set up vixie’s last night…

Leave a Reply to grahamsCancel reply