US Patent 11792469 Allocation of video recording functionality

A system may receive a plurality of requests to record a plurality of programs. Based on these requests, resources may be provisioned for transcoding variable bit rate streams into constant bit rate streams. Resources may be provisioned based on assigning transcoding tasks to an existing set of deployed devices in which the transcoding tasks correspond to the plurality of requests. Resources may further be provisioned based on incrementally deploying an additional device to the existing set of deployed devices when the transcoding capacity reaches a certain level.