Managing home and network storage of television recordings: "I filled my DVR again! Now what?"

In this paper we study the recording and watching patterns of DVR users using real traces. Many DVR users complain about running out of space. Thus, we propose the idea of adding extra storage on the network. Storing content in the network would create a new challenge, as most of users use their DVR during prime-time resulting in congesting the already strained network with unicast streams. We develop statistical models that learn the behavior of users and are most likely to make watched programs readily available for users each day. We develop a simple caching technique that captures the dominant factors of user behavior. Our verification, using real traces, shows that this technique performs as efficiently as more advanced statistical models, while requiring only a small state to be maintained.