Case Study: TiVo achieves massive real-time scalability and faster innovation with Confluent

TiVo Takes Customer-Centric Programming to New Heights with Apache Kafka

TiVo, a global media and entertainment company, was struggling with increasing backend complexity, costly bottlenecks, and the need to process billions of messages from millions of receivers to support personalization and new features. To decouple applications, speed time to innovation, and better aggregate clickstream, provisioning and metadata, TiVo engaged Confluent and adopted Apache Kafka as the foundation for a streaming data platform.

Confluent helped TiVo implement Kafka as a single source of truth—using features like log compaction, parallel reads, and elastic scaling—to enable a microservices architecture and remove heavy ETL. As a result, TiVo now processes billions of real-time messages daily, handles data spikes by scaling instances, moved from six-week monolithic releases to independent service deployments, freed developer resources, and accelerated feature development and stability. Confluent’s expertise with Kafka was cited as critical to these gains.

TiVo

James Cheng

Architect