By Jay Schiller, Michael Fallon,nCUBE Corporation
Set-top Personal Video Recording (PVR) at home and network PVR services from cable operators allow consumers to record and watch television programming at their leisure. PVR also gives consumers full VCR-like control (pause, rewind, and fast forward) over live television. This paper discusses the broadband video server architecture as a platform for network-based PVR services. Network PVR allows cable operators to offer PVR services to digital subscribers using existing digital set-top boxes without local hard disk drives. Instead, network PVR uses video on demand (VOD) systems with video servers and disk storage located in cable headends and hubs. Network PVR Video Server Architecture describes the technical infrastructure - at the hardware and software level - involved with capturing cable networks into a video server while simultaneously streaming to subscribers and offering full VCR-like control. The paper looks at network PVR architecture in detail, describing the video server requirements and capabilities, as well as the additional equipment and software required for deploying network PVR services. The paper also looks at the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) application integration that is required for consumers to interact with the network PVR service.