“Today each TiVo polls TiVo’s severs roughly every 15 minutes to check for new scheduled recordings, TiVoCast downloads, Unbox downloads, etc. That’s highly inefficient – nearly all of those polling calls are for nothing. There is nothing waiting to be done. And it introduces a lag when you want to start a download – up to 15 minutes. And it doesn’t scale well as TiVo’s user base keeps growing.

So what’s changed? The polling system is gone. TiVo is using XMPP now instead. What is XMPP? The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol – better known as the instant messaging protocol that powers Jabber, Google Talk, and other IM systems.” – Peter St. Andre noticed as interesting announcement coming out of CES. (via aaron)