TIVO and file size

So I had the lowest memory Ipad 1 (!), which could not deal with more than about 10 or so episodes being loaded on it for travel... I decided I wanted to get a Surface 3, which obviously has a lot more memory than an Ipad 1. But now I'm downloading shows using the Tivo Desktop plus and they appear to be really giant in size... like 7GB for an hour-long show, which eats up the memory very quickly. A big reason I wanted to do this was to take a lot of episodes with me on a 3-week long trip abroad. So I feel like I totally failed here. Is there anything that can be done? Any way to shrink the files? Are the TivoDesktop files for a single episode that much larger than an episode downloaded using the Ipad TIVO app?

Please help, keeping in mind that I am not very astute in terms of computers and the like.