A Collaborative Broadcast Content Recording System Using Distributed Personal Video Recorders

Abstract

Personal video recorders (PVRs) have altered the way users consume television (TV) content by allowing users to record programs and watch them at their convenience, overcoming the constraints of live broadcasting. However, standalone PVRs are limited by their individual storage capacities, restricting the number of programs they can store. While online catch-up TV services such as Hulu and Netflix mitigate this limitation by offering on-demand access to broadcast programs shortly after their initial broadcast, they require substantial storage and network resources, leading to significant infrastructural costs for service providers. To address these challenges, we propose a collaborative TV content recording system that leverages distributed PVRs, combining their storage into a virtual shared pool without additional costs. Our system aims to support all concurrent playback requests without service interruption while ensuring program availability comparable to that of local devices. The main contributions of our proposed system are fourfold. First, by sharing storage and upload bandwidth among PVRs, our system significantly expands the overall recording capacity and enables simultaneous recording of multiple programs without the physical constraints of standalone devices. Second, by utilizing erasure coding efficiently, our system reduces the storage space required for each program, allowing more programs to be recorded compared to traditional replication. Third, we propose an adaptive redundancy scheme to control the degree of redundancy of each program based on its evolving playback demand, ensuring high-quality playback by providing sufficient bandwidth for popular programs. Finally, we introduce a contribution-based incentive policy that encourages PVRs to actively participate by contributing resources, while discouraging excessive consumption of the combined storage pool. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed collaborative TV program recording system in terms of storage efficiency and performance.