Blowing up the Tube

On Thursday night, Jersey Shore premiered with a blowout of 8.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched series telecast in the history of MTV. Love it or hate it, the Shore is up 62% compared to last year's debut, according to the Nielson Co.

On the up-and-up, the reality soap's TV ratings have been progressively climbing, not "creeping," since it first aired in December 2009 with 1.4 million viewers. The Season 2 opener in July 2010 had 5.2 million people hooked.

While this news is shocking, it's also not a huge surprise. When you "punch" in a search on SnapStream's TV Trends (see: Snooki's face punch), the news results and media coverage match up 100%.

Tidal Wave of Jersey Shore News

All puns aside, the American news media propagates the popularity of Jersey Shore with continuous commentary and constant exposure. Think about it, any singular topic garnering this much attention in the press is going to incite public interest and provoke curiosity. No wonder people can't get enough.

The shenanigans on Jersey Shore have become the go-to source of pop culture satire—producing a gold mine of interviews, media appearances, spin-offs and talk material that everyone wants to capitalize on.

Snooki Dominates TV Trends

Play around with the graph below. Or visit tvtrends.com to type in your own keywords and see the context of each mention within the closed captioning. (Playback is reserved for SnapStream TV Search users.)

Snooki gets the most references, the most "hits" - isn't that interesting? She single-handedly outdoes the namesake of the show. If I was her, I'd command higher pay based on the sheer amount of media exposure she's raking in. So in conclusion, Snooki is the icon and MVP of Jersey Shore.

Have a great Friday. GTL.

For fun, here's the cast of Jersey Shore on The View:

Dear TV Searchers,

It's your lucky day. Your favorite television personalities have come together to wish you a joy-filled holiday season.

Stephen Colbert, Kelly Ripa and Conan O'Brian, along with others, contributed their greetings on-air from across the broadcast spectrum.

Well, sort of.

By way of our magical television search software, we present you with one continuous holiday greeting, made organically out of real television clips. No preservatives or artificial content added.

You see, with SnapStream TV Search you can easily search by keyword for anything said on TV. (We crawl the closed-captioning and program metadata.) From there, you can simply create clips and play them out into any editing suite, such as Avid or Final Cut Pro.

Lo and behold, that's precisely what Daniel Freed did. He crafted the SWEET VID below by weaving together multiple sources of mainstream television media. Though our software is intuitive for even the most fledgling user, the next step of video editing admittedly requires "mad skills." So, we give Mr. Freed serious props for the artful video blending.

If you're producing any kind of TV show where clips are involved—be it a news, talk, or comedy program—you'll definitely get a kick out of this...

Without further ado, please enjoy this freshly-baked video treat!

Season's Greetings,

Daniel Freed is a longtime SnapStream user and renaissance man of comedy writing, video production, filmmaking, investigative reporting and beyond. He currently exercises these talents at Tribune Broadcasting.

Thanks again, Daniel, producing this ultimate Holiday remix! danielfreed.com

(See another cool video Daniel created using SnapStream.)

Today's generation is "growing up digital", yet "wired for distraction."

Matt Richtel of the The New York Times put it so eloquently, as he recently covered this emerging trend to illustrate a bigger academic issue.

A myriad of tech toys are luring students' focus from their school-related tasks: computers, laptops, iPads, iPods, smartphones, handheld gaming consoles, and the list goes on ad nauseam! Imagine looking through the eyes of these millennial youngsters.

How can a standard textbook compete with the fun and interactivity of an e-book reader? How does a dull worksheet compare to a smartphone?

As educators and as a society, we must embrace new technology and applications, instead of trying to battle them or ban them from learning environments. SnapStream is a fervent believer in integrating technology into the classroom, and our specialty encompasses TV search and TV streaming.

Kids love TV. It's a hot medium with moving pictures and sounds that combine to form a brilliant memory aid when it comes to retaining information. While TV is nothing new (per se), it's still the most influential and powerful source of breaking news and local updates. (See results of a fascinating broadcast study released earlier this year.)

Plus, the delivery mechanism of TV is constantly evolving. Look at Google TV, which melds the Web and social apps with traditional TV. Consider SnapStream's technology, which enables keyword search over televised closed-captioning.

While textbooks contain unchanging history, television adds a freshly updated perspective to the lesson.

Find a relevant program on the subject or unit in progress, and the planned lesson can be adapted to what's airing today. New stories and developments found on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, CNN and elsewhere make for a brilliant curricular supplement.

So, what have we learned?

Students will be more engaged and stimulated when learning is hands-on. Taking the fun-and-games gadgetry they use outside of school, and using it in school, could be the recipe for a breakthrough.

And when technology funding is an issue, there are public service programs, such as Cable in the Classroom, and government grant programs like Ed-Tech, designed to help with that. Because let's face it, the iPad is a luxury for a public school system... but television? Open access to TV should be a staple in all classrooms. (20th or 21st century!)

Readers, I'd love to know, what ways are you using technology in the classroom today? Feel free to share how you're innovating with what budgets you have.

Dear @DPBuzz, it was great meeting you at GV Expo 2010. Thanks for stopping by SnapStream's booth to learn more about our television search technology.

Now all of our blog followers can tune into the chat with Tom Wilson to better understand our application. Bet you didn't know that we have some cool, bigwig government customers like the Library of Congress and U.S. Senate.

For more coverage of the Government Video Expo, visit digitalproductionbuzz.com

As media outlets were buzzing yesterday about midterm elections, we were closely tracking what was mentioned on major television networks here at SnapStream headquarters.

Since we're a television search and monitoring company, we employ our own SnapStream Servers to record U.S. national TV (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, CNN and HLN) and provide insights into what is said on U.S. television. On big news days, like an election night, we gather all the closed-captioning data and run the numbers to distinguish the overarching news trends.

From SnapStream's aggregated television data, clear-cut trends emerge about the nation’s pulse during this pivotal midterm election, which serves as a forecasting indicator of the political climate stirring for the 2012 Presidential Election.

Based on over 60,000 hours of recorded television, freely accessible to anyone at tvtrends.com, we find a heavily evident media focus on the Republican Party and a direct correlation with the outcome of Tuesday’s balloting. As Democrats’ majority in Congress slipped, so did their rate and frequency of national news coverage.

Several approximations are used when computing results, such as how many mentions occur per unique hour. To determine the “hot” and “cold” measure of certain words or topics, we use an equation to calculate a frequency score that’s normalized to the number of hours of TV recorded on any given day.

An overview of keyword frequency across news channels, in descending order:

SnapStream TV Trends aims to provide insights into what is said on U.S. television. Updates occur every half hour and data is shown once the show is complete. To customize your own TV Trend search, visit http://www.snapstream.com/tvtrends.

If you missed the SMPTE conference this year, have no fear. We're recreating our presentation content just for you! Straight from SnapStream's file-based workflows session: "Inside the Jokes: TV Search Technology Yields Creative, Comedic Screenwriting."

This Wednesday, Nov. 3, you'll catch a glimpse of the HD workflows and long-term storage setup we pioneered at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, along with a behind-the-scenes look at how The Soup searches and clips TV.

HD Workflows & Long-Term Storage Wednesday, November 3 3:30 - 4:30 p.m. EDT. Live Q & A to follow Sign up now at GoToMeeting (it's free)

Mickey Mouse knows what's up: Police Chiefs have invaded Orlando, FL, gathering from all around the globe at the International Association of Chief of Police Annual Conference Oct. 23-27. It's their 117th annual gathering. (Since 1893, folks!)

From patrolling on horseback at the turn of the century to searching TV in the new millennium, IACP has come a long way as the world's largest oldest and largest association of law enforcement executives.

On Saturday, Oct. 23, SnapStream's CEO Rakesh Agrawal and Senior Sales Engineer Tom Wilson led a session in the Public Information Officers section track. Our friends at the Plano Police Department (TX) and Lee County Sheriff's Office (FL), Officer Rick McDonald and Lieutenant Larry King respectively, participated in the panel discussion as well.

Both PIOs are SnapStream users who rely on TV search technology in their day-to-day media communications. The topic of discussion, "Instant Television Communication to your iPhone and other Applications During a Crisis," included case studies from Plano PD and Lee County detailing their uses of search, clipping and TV Alerts in action. If you'd like a copy of the presentation, send an e-mail to sales@snapstream.com

Here's one example from Lee County Sheriff's Office (LCSO). When the State Attorney's Office dropped murder charges on two suspects arrested by LCSO, local media all used the word "botched" in reference to the investigation. At no point did the District Attorney (or anyone) use this term. See for yourself how this was a flagrant case of the media "piling on." PIO Lt. King brought this reel into a meeting between public safety and the media: prepared, supporting evidence using SnapStream.

This year, IACP attracted nearly 14,000 attendees with members diversified from over 100 countries. The workshops provide excellent training opportunities in law enforcement leadership, tackling new, yet important issues like social media policy and outreach and media response with TV search technology. For conference updates, visit the IACP 2010 Blog or follow @IACPOfficial on Twitter.

So I'm a big fan of Oprah and I DVR every episode (season pass, obviously). Last night, I watched the "Are You Normal?" episode which aired yesterday. Throughout the show, Oprah did a series of polls with the audience about people's random habits to discern if the quirky things we do in private are "normal." Exploring tame questions like "How often do you pick your nose?" to much more personal and embarrassing subjects, it was human nature at its most candid and the results were funny to everyone.

Throughout the show Oprah dropped a teaser question: "What is the most Googled word?" Perhaps to indicate what people are most curious about. After all, the anonymity of the Web is the perfect cloak to hide those secretive sort of inquiries.

What's your guess?

The answer...

Google Trends

was love. I cross-referenced with Google Trends to investigate and found that sex is actually way higher in average worldwide traffic. As in, love comes nowhere near the search volume! Where is Oprah getting this information from? I would love to know.

Hmm, but this got my wheels turning. At SnapStream, we often compare Google Trends to TV Trends because it's cool to see how trends differ between online searches and TV news coverage.

The way I see it, it's like information economics: TV is the outgoing supply of information (one size fits all) and Google is the information you demand to know (what whets your appetite). Sometimes, they match identically. Other times, there's zero correlation.

TV Trends

So I took it to SnapStream's TV Trends for good measure. The results truly astonished me. In the course of 2009, money dominated the topic of media conversation. Okay, no surprise there, owing to the recession year, but wait, there's more.

Let the sun shine all over 2010: love and money interwine on the graph, dancing above and below each other in unpredictable steps. Who would have thought that love would spread like butter on the media's radar? Mush. Not exactly hard-breaking news.

Although... a recent (very recent) news story featuring love pops into mind. Did you watch the Chilean miners' miraculous rescue mission unfold?! All of the reporters were exclaiming how captivating the individual stories and relationships were: to see husbands and wives reuniting was like "watching a wedding," one CNN reporter said, but with deeper gravity in the circumstances. Emotions were running with adrenaline through this positive, uplifting story, proving that maybe sometimes, in our business-focused society, "love rules." That's how Oprah put it.

The popular New York Times Blog, Media Decoder, pointed out a noteworthy trend this week. You may have speculated on this, owing to Apple's flashy press events and drawn out product releases, but a recently-published study from Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism confirms it. (Hey, they use SnapStream to analyze TV, high fives!)

The nitty-gritty: Apple is commanding an inordinate amount of broadcast hours, columns per inch and online real estate in our mainstream media. Encoding a year of technology news articles by topic, here's what the researchers found:

We took it to our own rich source of television monitoring data, TV Trends, to graphically show how these tech competitors have duked it out over time. So what's the verdict? Apple takes the cake, visibly, with high-frequency mentions frenzied by date. The playing field appeared level between Apple, Google and Microsoft up until Jan. 27, 2010, the day the iPad was born.