In the spirit of the season, we are delighted to share a special video treat with you. SnapStream's little helpers ransacked their archive of goodies to produce a year in review through the eyes of TV search. Please pour yourself a glass of eggnog and sing along as we wish you a merry holiday season and a happy new year!
Keep on searching in 2012,
Team SnapStream
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Five dollar footlongs, five golden rings and five years of Government Video Expo. Five is indeed a prime number. SnapStream is entering its fifth season of showcasing its TV search technology at GV Expo, the East Coast's largest pro video and broadcast expo. Will you be there?
If so, be sure to come and find us! This year, we're smack dab in the middle of all the techie action at booth #523. Exhibits run November 30 and December 1 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in none other than Washington, D.C.
In the context of federal government, SnapStream fits the bill for a variety of purposes, like TV monitoring intelligence and political campaign tracking. At the local level, public information officers leverage SnapStream's TV search and clipping technology to chronicle their media content. In turn, SnapStream supplies a huge workflow boost, expediting media responsiveness while eliminating the chore of manually scanning recorded broadcasts.
Get in touch if you'd like to schedule a demo with us during GV Expo.
With bounties of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie on our minds this week, it's easy to lose sight of what Thanksgiving is really all about. Giving thanks.
At SnapStream, we thank our lucky stars we're in Texas. We will never forget our HTPC roots and humble beginnings as we continue to grow the enterprise-class TV monitoring solution that we provide today. To all of our power users and loyal advocates (that means you, reading this blog!), we greatly appreciate your support.
On our Yammer network (which is thankfully free and awesome), I posted a question to Team SnapStream, "What are you most thankful for this year?" I'll let the responses speak for themselves. Small disclaimer: Employee avatars have not been altered from their original form.
Aaron Thompson, President
Rakesh Agrawal, Founder and CEO
Rob Alexander, Software Engineer
Zack Price, Manager of Quality Assurance
Adrienne Gonzalez, Platform Engineer and Technical Support Rep
Chris Wilkerson, IT Manager
Daniel Mee, Technical Support Rep
Jason Baumeister, Director of Development
Josie Munoz, Accountant
Michael Bui, Technical Support Rep
Gerard Monier, Developer in Test
Joel Gabiola, Marketing Director
Elbert Pruitt Jr., Software Test Engineer
Allen Moody, Technical Account Manager
Rachel Eichenbaum, Marketing Campaigns Manager
Dear reader, what are you thankful for? Feel free to share in the comments.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Lots of folks have conspiracy theories about the government, that the government is Big Brother; the government is always watching. Well, I'm here to tell you that government surveillance is a real thing, in one aspect that I know for sure, and that is television monitoring. I can say this with the utmost certainty because SnapStream is in use at hundreds of government organizations throughout the United States, Canada and beyond.
Today, our team is on the ground at GTEC, Canada's largest government technology exposition. It's our second year showcasing TV Search at this event thanks to our partner, CBCI Telecom, for prompting us to make it a yearly ritual. At the brand new Ottawa Convention Centre, the government's IT community will congregate to see the hottest spread of tech offerings, looking for ways to improve operational efficiency while justifying the budget spend, no doubt.
In these aspects, SnapStream is attractive for many public affairs and public information departments who have a vested interest in monitoring televised media on their own terms. Politicians and political parties, too, are a great fit for SnapStream. With SnapStream, you are the keeper of your TV recordings—you have the power to search, clip, archive and transcode your content.
After attending GV Expo last year, I learned that having in-house control over this process is key for government authorities, who need to respond to media requests, dispatch information and maintain an archival of all their press appearances, mentions and activities.
If you're at GTEC Oct. 18 and 19, come visit SnapStream at booth 123 for a demonstration. The first time you see a TV search in action, you'll be amazed at how familiar it feels, just like searching the Web. It's that snappy and easy.
At the 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart added two more Emmy® statuettes to its category-sweeping collection. The Daily Show has an incredible winning streak to celebrate, going nine years strong for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series and earning its seventh all-time award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Series. Kudos!
To date they've racked up 16 Emmys, and we can't help but feel warm fuzzies all over— knowing that the show's comedy writers use our TV search technology to make some of the funniest television around. They've produced a recipe for lasting success: artfully pruning TV clips, seasoning them with sharp wit and serving them straight up ridiculous, Stewart-style. And we just can't get enough.
No joke, we hoard episodes of The Daily Show around here, as much for lunch-break entertainment as for pure inspiration. Every time we watch, we're in awe of what they do, using our product in such a creative way. While SnapStream is incredibly easy-to-use for any average Joe, the writing process that takes place around the technical workflow cannot be taught in any of our user training sessions. These talented content creators bring TV search to life, mixing montages and clever jokes in ways you couldn't imagine.
Before going up on stage to accept each Emmy award on Sunday night, Jon Stewart notably bear-hugged Stephen Colbert both times. I couldn't help but smile. Little do most viewers know, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show not only share the same production company, but they also have a joint SnapStream Cluster. Stewart said, "We're acutely aware of how fortunate we are to win it once let alone many times."
Today is the day! At the 2011 International Broadcasting Convention, Europe's largest professional broadcast show, SnapStream will premiere its best-of-breed TV recording and search capabilities on the world's stage, Hall 6, Stand 6.A06. This is a highly anticipated moment by many, and I mean MANY. Every day, we receive messages from organizations all over the world, looking to enlist SnapStream to solve their TV monitoring problems (which include costly clipping services and traditional, subscription-based media monitoring services).
The international distinction, or technical hurdle, has long been the varying digital broadcast standards native to each country. For example: In the U.S. and Canada, it's ATSC. In Europe, it's DVB-T and PAL. We soon discovered it wasn't going to be a simple migration to transfer the complexity of SnapStream's architecture over to these foreign standards.
Luckily, our engineers are incredibly smart people! So it's in due course that our team is now on the ground in Amsterdam, showcasing the first prototype of our European TV monitoring technology. The new SnapStream adds support for PAL and early support for DVB-T. Subtitles and teletext searching will be incorporated into a subsequent release.
If you're at the Amsterdam RAI, Septemeber 9 - 13, you'll see up close how SnapStream enables organizations to record, log and search traditional TV (terrestrial, cable or satellite), all over the LAN.
Today, our powerful TV monitoring platform is used by hundreds of broadcasters, production studios, educators and governments across North America. Now, European organizations will soon be able to leverage SnapStream's robust capabilities:
- Record large amounts of TV, from 4 channels to 50 channels or... more!
- Archive an unlimited amount of TV shows with expandable storage
- Access TV over the LAN from any LAN connected PC with a web browser
- Perform real-time keyword searches of subtitles (where available)
- Easily create, download and e-mail TV clips
- Receive TV e-mail alerts of specific mentions
- Watch TV from any PC on the network
- Transcode TV files seamlessly and quickly to WMV and H.264 formats
If you're not going to be at the show, contact us to set up a Web demo and to glean additional information.
First of all, who knew the East Coast of the U.S. was prone to seismic activity? The last earthquake on record for the region was 1897!
When breaking news unfolds in a flash, SnapStream comes in extremely handy to rack up mentions about a particular topic. Boom, boom, boom. Today's rattling event is a prime example of our powerful TV search technology at work. In a matter of seconds, I pulled up 100+ hits and climbing for the keyword "earthquake," based on the local and national news channels recording at our office in Houston. (What you can record, is what you can search.)
How is your organization monitoring the East Coast quake? See examples of my TV search findings (click images to enlarge).
P.S. To all of our customers and partners in the DC and NE area, we hope you're doing OK!
You just watched that video, right? That was our very own Sam Houston, the Academy-award-winning actor we hired to document our field trip. Just kidding, Sam's actually our multi-talented inside salesman. (No joke, this boy can sing! Check out his vocals here.)
Now on to the outing! Not far from the metropolis of Houston lies a well-manicured city called Sugar Land, named righteously so for its rich history steeped in sugar cane. We recently visited Sugar Land's City Hall (only a 30-minute drive from our office) to get a real insider's view of the city government complex and of course, their extra sweet SnapStream setup!
We met with Brent Neeley, municipal television producer at the City of Sugar Land, who gave us a full tour through the facility, top to bottom. He has a cool job which involves capturing and broadcasting the city council meetings and proceedings onto the City of Sugar Land's local channel. Plus, Brent manages the entire TV monitoring operation for the city.
Brent keeps the SnapStream appliance powered up and protected in the temperature-controlled and key-padded server room (very secure). But, he accesses all of his TV recordings from his desktop PC upstairs over the LAN connection. Sugar Land has six analog tuners dedicated to recording the four major networks, the city's local network and a wildcard for ad hoc news needs.
Now, I won't sugarcoat it for you, this is what Sugar Land was working with before they switched to SnapStream in 2009.
While TiVo works great as a DVR for at-home use, it's just not brawny enough to accomplish the robust TV monitoring tasks of city-level operation. That's simply not what TiVo was created to do. Therefore, SnapStream has proven to be a valuable investment, saving the City time and money, as a product of increased efficiency in everyday workflows plus the increased reliability and confidence in the hardware platform itself.
What a simple TV search for "Twitter" can do to inspire a LOL three-minute segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Lots of talk show hosts can talk the talk (naturally), but Jon Stewart and his team really bring the goods—pumping in all kinds of TV news clips to irrefutably make a sharp-tongued point. Gotta love it! And for the record, @SnapStream is now following @LadyBigMac. Slightly confused? Just watch.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-july-27-2011/twitter-pundits
