# Out of Home Streaming Technical Architecture



## dlcrow (Sep 26, 2002)

Has anyone discovered and/or described the technical architecture behind out of home streaming?

It appears to be firewall friendly and doesn't require opening ports for connectivity to be initiated from the destination device, so I'm wondering if every TiVo and/or Stream now has a constant open connection that allows instantaneous connectivity between an out-of-home device and the TiVo. Perhaps some type of long polling architecture is being used?


----------



## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

It's currently using a proxy. They're working on an option that will allow you to use a more direct port forwarding method on your home router, but it's not ready yet.


----------



## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

Based upon what I can see the Stream keeps a session open to 136.179.5.135 on tcp port 1195. The IP address is owned by TiVO.

This is how its firewall/NAT friendly, the connection is initiated from inside your network and left up.


----------



## ellinj (Feb 26, 2002)

Is there some advantage of direct streaming or is this simply a resource reduction for Tivo?


----------



## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

ellinj said:


> Is there some advantage of direct streaming or is this simply a resource reduction for Tivo?


 Eliminating a Proxy means one less potential source of failure plus should speed things up. The reason they implemented the proxy is for simplifying setup rather than having to ask user to forward port(s) in their router (and having to use static IP for the TiVo Stream as well which currently user has no control over). They also could have gone with uPNP which is perhaps what they are planning to do eventually to eliminate proxy and need for manual port forwarding in router.


----------



## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

The Slingbox uses uPNP by default but offers an option for manual port forwarding if your router doesn't support uPNP. Personally I don't like automated options like uPNP because I like to know what's going on in my network, but I can understand why TiVo/Sling would want something like that for less technical users.


----------

