Case study · Product development
VOD WFM – Video Infrastructure Built to Last
Millions of households worldwide watch video-on-demand content delivered through a platform we co-built with TiVO (now XPERI). It runs in 18 markets, processes 66 million tasks a year, and has been operating at production scale since 2016.
The problem
Engineering at the speed of TiVO’s market opportunity
TiVO had a clear go-to-market opportunity: provide cable operators with a video infrastructure package, including a Content Management System and automated VOD provisioning. The CMS opened doors. The VOD layer would scale the relationships.
The challenge was timing.
Building VOD provisioning meant:
- A process engine with high availability and failure tolerance – operators can’t tolerate downtime that interrupts subscriber service
- Complex multi-system integration – source film providers, metadata systems, encoding pipelines, and operator infrastructure all had to interoperate cleanly
- A Java engineering team – strategically chosen by TiVO, but not yet built up internally
Standing up that team and shipping the platform in parallel – while the market opportunity was open – wasn’t feasible. TiVO needed a partner who could bring the engineering capability immediately, build the platform alongside their existing teams, and structure the work so TiVO’s organization would be positioned to operate it long-term.
We started that engagement in March 2016.
VOD WFM in numbers
| Users and households served | 30M+ |
| Localities deployed | 18 |
| Individual tasks processed annually | 66M |
| VOD bundles successfully processed | 3M+ |
| Years of collaborative development | 5 |
| Years TiVO has operated it independently | 5 and going |
What changed for TiVO’s business
The VOD workflow manager started as a supporting layer for TiVO’s mid-market operator package. As its capabilities matured, four things changed:
Enterprise operators became viable customers.
The modular architecture let TiVO adapt the same engine to each operator’s infrastructure without forking codebases. What started as a mid-market tool became infrastructure trusted by enterprise-scale operators worldwide.
It became a strategic product asset
As TiVO’s product strategy evolved, the CMS that was originally the lead product was sunset. The VOD workflow manager, by contrast, became a core component of TiVO’s offering for the world’s largest operators – a position it holds today.
New markets opened up
The platform’s design enabled deployment across 18 markets, each with its own operator requirements, regulatory environment, and content sources.
TiVO built an independent engineering capability
Through four years of co-development, their team built the institutional knowledge to operate and evolve the platform on their own. They took full ownership in 2020 and have scaled it under their own stewardship for the six years since.
The original brief was “build us this platform.” The outcome was a platform, a strategic product asset, and an engineering team confident enough to own it – and XPERI keeps coming back to us for other work, which is the strongest endorsement of how the first engagement was structured.
What clients say
Real feedback from engineering leaders we’ve worked with.
“Codeweaver is a very experienced and reliable business partner. I had the pleasure of working with them for the last few years, and during that time, they always showed a very professional approach and creative thinking. They are not only highly skilled IT engineers but also great people who are easy to communicate with, but most of all, I appreciate how proactive they are and how fast they can deliver new features.”
ŁK
Łukasz Kołodziej
Director, Backend Solutions Development, XPERI
“Over the course of two complex, custom projects, Codeweaver established a position of a reliable and highly performing partner. Driven by technology enthusiasm, market experience and client focus, Codeweaver became our first pick for integration heavy-lifting.”
Adam Dawidziuk
Engineering Director, XPERI
“Codeweaver orchestrated and executed the development process of our custom VOD content platform. On top of impressive technical knowledge and skills, Codeweaver displayed an exceptional interest in deep understanding of the business domain and specifics. Highly-motivated and engaged throughout the course of the project, they delivered the software that simply works.”
PL
Piotr Lendo
System Architect, XPERI
Process – from tight deadline to clean handoff
We didn’t build this in neat phases. We built it in stages, each one driven by what the operator needed next – and from the start, with an eye on the day they’d run it themselves.
March 2016 – November 2016
Kickoff under pressure
The first version had to ship for a Latin American operator on an aggressively tight deadline – tight given the scope on the table. We delivered the first working VOD workflow manager into production.
January 2017 – 2018
Hardening and reach
With the first release live, we cleaned up, broadened encoder support, and added multi-localization: the same content provisioned to several markets at once, since the operator ran the service across multiple countries.
2018 – 2019
The second-generation platform
A rebuilt, properly modular architecture – per-client configuration without touching the codebase. New clients came on, along with integrations into encoding, content management, and CDN systems.
2019 – May 2020
Build it, then hand it over
More of the same evolution, running in parallel with something deliberate: building up the client’s own team to take the platform over. By the time we stepped back, they were ready to run it without us.
Four years. Built under pressure, evolved through new clients and markets, and handed off clean – and we’ve kept working with XPERI on other initiatives since.
Key features
The platform’s design reflected three commercial realities: operators couldn’t tolerate downtime, every operator needed something slightly different, and TiVO would eventually need to maintain it without us.
Multi-source content ingestion
Handles film files and metadata from multiple providers, normalizing them into operator-ready packages
High-throughput processing
Built for the 66M-task-per-year load profile, with headroom for growth
Java-native architecture
Chosen to align with TiVO’s long-term engineering hiring strategy
Documentation built alongside code
Architecture decisions, integration maps, and runbooks designed for engineers joining the project years after delivery