Several of us from the SnapStream team are in Las Vegas right now at the National Association of Broadcaster's event (we're in the south upper hall #SU2707-- if you're here, stop by and say hi). One of the questions we get a lot of is, simply, "What is SnapStream?"

It's probably fair to assume that many of you here on the blog share this question... so let me answer that question here.

So, what is SnapStream?

You probably search the web every day with search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. SnapStream delivers a similar search experience for traditional TV shows -- you know, the stuff you get over-the-air, cable, or satellite. That's to say, SnapStream makes it possible to search TV shows from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, ESPN, Comedy Central, CSPAN, or anything on network television.

Here's an example of the kind of search results that we deliver for traditional television:

How does it work?

SnapStream's TV search technology uses closed-captioning (that's included in almost all TV content in the U.S. and Canada, here in the U.S. it's mandated by the FCC) and program guide data to power it's TV search engine.

Our customers purchase a turn-key TV search appliance (a piece of hardware) from us. It's delivered pre-configured, making it easy to setup and install. This SnapStream TV search appliance can record up to 10 channels at a time and then our software, running on this appliance, indexes those recordings and makes them searchable.

Here's a video demo'ing our TV search interface:

So there are the basics. Have any other questions? Post them in the comments and I'll answer them!

Alexandra Fenwick at the Columbia Journalism Review interviewed me on a recent trip to New York City. That interview resulted in this piece about SnapStream and how folks are using it in academia and in entertainment. Check it out!

It's traditional television, according to a study that the Pew Research released earlier this month.

In the line-up of 'where people get their news', traditional television took the #1 and #2 spots (specifically, #1 went to 'local TV stations' and #2 went to 'national TV network') followed by the Internet. (read the link above for more details)

We talk to people all the time who can easily (or easily enough) use things like Google Alerts to track what's being said online but tracking what's being said on traditional television is more difficult.

And that's where SnapStream's TV search appliance and our TV Trends services come in. We make it easier to for organizations to track what's being said on traditional television.

With our TV search appliance, you can do searches across traditional television, quickly browse the video search results, create and email clips, and burn DVDs.

And with TV Trends, we record national TV news (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN) and make it so you can view trends.

Cool! SnapStream's TV search technology got a nice mention on the popular podcast "This Week in Tech (TWiT)" (link) yesterday.

You can find the episode here and the mention is at the 1 hour, 16 minutes, 35 second mark (1:16:35s).

Here's a transcript of the mention:

Leo Laporte: You know who does that so well is the Daily Show? I don't know who they've got as their librarian or their editors.

Dwight Silverman: SnapStream, they're using a company called SnapStream based here in Houston.

Leo Laporte: Really?

Dwight Silverman: Yeah, that basically does contextual searches within video.

Leo Laporte: Because they can find anything. I mean they'll pull up... in real-time almost. They've got a clip reel on the daily show and it's just amazing.

Dwight Silverman: Yeah it's a great company, they've been around for a long time. They started out with a product that was similar to TIVO for PCs. They got out of the consumer market... Beyond TV is what's it's called.

Leo Laporte: Oh yeah, I remember that.

Dwight Silverman: They've kind of moved out of the consumer market and are selling this technology to companies like the Daily Show.

Leo Laporte: So... is it done automatically by computers or they have humans tagging it?

Brett Larson: They could be taking in the closed captioning and marrying it to the video stream.

Leo Laporte: Ah clever. Clever, clever.

And thanks to Dwight Silverman for mentioning SnapStream. Purva Patel at the Houston Chronicle wrote a story about SnapStream's win at the Daily Show, if you want to read more about it.

And if you're new to it, you can learn more about SnapStream's TV search technology here.

Updated 11/3/2017: added new information about creating a Digital TV head-end in the cloud

Updated 10/18/2011: added information on Drake's HDMI to QAM / HD encoder products-- the DSE24 and the HDE24.

At the end of last year, I wrote a blog posting about how to create your own analog TV headend. Today, I'm going to talk about how to do accomplish the same thing, but with digital, high-definition television.

Standard-definition analog TV is fine for some media monitoring and TV recording scenarios. But in other scenarios you might want to record TV shows in the highest quality possible.

Maybe you produce a TV show, like The Soup or , the Daily Show/Colbert Report and when you include a TV clip inside your show, you want it to show up at the highest quality possible.

Or maybe you're a non-profit that wants to showcase your media mentions on television at the highest possible quality to donors.

For scenarios such as these, you want to record television in high-definition and be able to search within those recordings in high-definition as well.

There are a couple of ways to make HD recordings and be able to search within them:

New - How to create your own digital (IP) TV head-end in the Cloud

Recording ATSC

ATSC is the standard by which digital TV is transmitted over-the-air in the United States. It's transmitted without encryption, so recording and searching TV broadcast over ATSC is pretty easy. Just get and install an antenna for your physical location and connect the output from that antenna to your SnapStream TV search appliance (note: it has to be one of our HD-capable appliances) and just use SnapStream as you would with any other TV source... we have full program guide data for ATSC signals in the United States and parts of Canada and using ATSC with SnapStream is really straightforward.

But what if you want to record something in high-definition that's not available over the air? What if you want to record something like ESPN HD or CNN HD or MSNBC HD?

Well, then you'll need to build your own QAM headend. What's that? Read on...

Building your own unencrypted QAM headend

To make high-definition (HD) recordings of channels that aren't available over-the-air (OTA), you'll need to build your own unencrypted QAM head-end. Unencrypted QAM, like ATSC, is something that SnapStream's HD TV search appliance can take as an input and record from.

Building your own unencrypted QAM head-end is pretty similar to building an analog TV headend. You follow the same basic steps:

1) get your TV sources
2) modulate each source to QAM
3) combine the modulated channels into one feed!

So for step 1, you'll simply get your high-definition TV source from whatever provider you choose -- this might be from a digital cable provider (like Comcast or Time Warner Cable) or from a satellite service (DirecTV or DISH). For each channel you want to modulate, you'll need a single receiver (or set-top box). And each of these receivers need to be capable of high-definition TV. You should also choose a receiver that can output HDMI or component while also outputting analog composite or s-video. The analog composite or s-video is how, in most cases, you'll be able to access the closed-captioning for searching with SnapStream.

Then for step 2 (modulating each source to QAM), we recommend using a simple one-box QAM modulation solution. There are three such solutions that we know of on the market today, and we've heard of a bunch more that are coming -- there seems to be a rising demand for one-box QAM modulation solutions. More on this below.

Then in step 3, you would simply combine all of these signals together using a combiner, much as we described in our article on how to build an analog headend.

The one-box QAM modulation devices (ie what you need for step 2) that are a) shipping today, b) that we've tested in the lab here at SnapStream, are:

Blonder Tongue's HDE-QAM: This is a pretty simple box that takes in HDMI, modulates its audio and video to unencrypted QAM, and outputs it via coax. The HDE-QAM also has an ethernet port for accessing it's web-based settings page where you can configure the channel/sub-channel to which it modulates and the quality (bit-rate) at which the encoding happens. Images of the front and the back of the Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM:

The Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM appears to have been around the longest amount of time -- we learned about it in March of 2009. The list price for the Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM is $10,000 (we expect this to come down). More information on the HDE-QAM can be found on Blonder Tongue's website.

Adtec's HDMI-2-QAM: The Adtec HDMI-2-QAM is less expensive than the Blonder Tongue AND has more features. Like the Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM, the Adtec takes in HDMI, but it can handle two channels in its 1U chassis. So it takes two HDMI inputs and modulates both of those to a single QAM channel, each on its own sub-channel. It also is supposed to have support for passing closed-captioning through (which the Blonder Tongue unit does not have support for), though at the time of writing this blog posting, this was still being worked on and should be fully enabled in a soon-to-be-released firmware update. One important note: the Adtec HDMI-2-QAM will not allow you to modulate a source HDMI signal that has HDCP copy protection enabled (the Blonder Tongue does).

Images of the front and back of the Adtec HDMI to QAM (click the front and back panel for larger images):

The Adtec HDMI-2-QAM first began shipping in November and it's just now beginning to ramp up to production quantities. The list price on the Adtec HDMI-2-QAM is $7500, making it a price-attractive option at $3750 per channel.

Contemporary Research's QMOD-HD: Finally, there's the QMOD-HD from Contemporary Research. Instead of HDMI (which both the Blonder Tongue and Adtec products use), the Contemporary Research QMOD-HD takes in video via a composite high-definition signal (Y-Pb-PR cables) and audio via an optical audio input or analog audio composite (left and right) inputs. And then it modulates that audio and video to QAM. One unit of the QMOD-HD handles a single channel. The advantage to using composite inputs is that the QMOD-HD doesn't have to worry about handling HDCP encryption that might be present on the HDMI signal. The QMOD-HD does not have any support for passing closed-captioning data.

Here are images of the front and back of the Contemporary Research QMOD-HD:

This is the newest one-box QAM modulation solution that we've come across -- it started shipping in quantity last week (Feb 2010). The list price for one unit of the CR QMOD-HD is $2450, making it the least expensive per channel of the three options we've listed here.

Drake's HDE24+MEQ-1000 and Drake DSE24 products (new!): While we haven't fully tested and reviewed them yet, we recently discovered Drake's DSE24 and HDE24 products. Read preliminary information here. (Updated 7/26/2011)

Have any questions about building your own QAM headend for the purposes of recording and searching high-definition television? Drop us an e-mail at sales@snapstream.com.

We announced Current TV as a SnapStream customer earlier today (press release copied below).

If you've never watched Infomania, it's a look back on the week in media, similar in form to The Soup on E! and Best Week Ever on VH1/MTV (both shows that also run off of our TV search technology).

One of the segments that Infomania does that I'm a big fan of is "Target Women" with Sarah Haskins. Hilarious stuff.

The press release:

Current TV and infoMania Install SnapStream, Replace “Messy” DVR Setup

Houston, TX (PRWEB) February 10, 2010 -- SnapStream Media, Inc., announced today that infoMania, the half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV, has installed a six-tuner SnapStream Server to record, search, and grab video clips for usage in their weekly commentary. Launched in 2007, the SnapStream Server is a turn-key television search appliance that enables organizations to record and store thousands of hours of television and then search inside those recordings by keywords and phrases.

Each week, the infoMania crew strives to put a humorous spin on media trends, routinely using video clips from TV and the Web to illustrate jokes. When the show debuted in 2008, staffers were doing a lot of extra work to track down footage.
Current now uses SnapStream to make infoMania. SnapStream’s technology allows infoMania to record six shows simultaneously and store hundreds of hours of television. Its producers can then quickly locate the desired footage by keyword. The biggest gain, says global senior broadcast engineer Dave Simon, is the ability to find content fast. "SnapStream was the first system we looked at that had the ability to record and search closed-captioning," Simon says. "To a television operation like infoMania, that is paramount."

In addition, Current Media, the corporation that owns and produces infoMania, has installed a second SnapStream Server for media monitoring in their San Francisco office.

“Their selection of SnapStream to not only produce infoMania, but also to monitor media mentions of the company itself, as well as create content for their corporate video and news feeds, speaks volumes about the power and capabilities behind the SnapStream Server solution,” said Rakesh Agrawal, SnapStream’s CEO and Founder.

Visit the http://www.snapstream.com/ website to learn more about SnapStream's affordable and effective TV search technology - our turn-key TV search appliances starting at $2,000.

About SnapStream Media, Inc.

SnapStream allows organizations to put their finger on the pulse of traditional television. Customers can record a virtually unlimited number of TV shows from satellite, cable or antenna and then search inside those TV shows to pinpoint television content of interest. Existing customers include government organizations, such as the U.S. Senate and the City of New York, to educational institutions at the university and K-12 level to entertainment organizations such as Comcast Entertainment, Current TV, and MTV.

(First time visitors: Welcome to SnapStream! We make TV search software used by organizations to search inside TV shows. And it's not too expensive, starting at $2,000. What's TV search, you ask? Watch this YouTube video or visit our website to learn more.)

We don't do a lot of press releases anymore, but here's one that went out earlier this morning. Congrats to my team here at SnapStream!

(PR Web has the press release and graphics here)

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report Choose SnapStream to Monitor and Search Broadcast Television

Houston, December 21, 2009 - SnapStream Media, Inc. announced today that Comedy Central’s hit TV shows "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report," have selected the company’s TV search solution for locating and packaging high-definition clips from television broadcasts. Launched in 2007, SnapStream Server is a turn-key television search appliance that enables organizations to record and store thousands of hours of television and then search inside those recordings by keywords and phrases.

“Part of what makes the Daily Show and the Colbert Report great is their satire of news stories, media organizations and political figures. So they are very serious about monitoring television! As the shows deploy SnapStream, we believe our TV search technology will prove invaluable and essential to them—technically and creatively,” said Rakesh Agrawal, SnapStream’s CEO and Founder. “And their selection of SnapStream, after a rigorous evaluation process, validates the uniqueness and power of our TV search technology for any organizations that needs to monitor television.”

The SnapStream TV search solution to be deployed at the Daily Show and Colbert Report will provide for a completely high-definition (HD) workflow, allowing the show’s producers to centrally record and archive more than 30 channels of traditional HDTV; then subsequently search those recordings, create clips that can interact with Avid and Final Cut Pro video editing systems.

Visit the http://www.snapstream.com/ website to learn more about SnapStream's affordable and effective TV search technology - our turn-key TV search appliances starting at $2,000.

About SnapStream Media, Inc.

SnapStream allows organizations to put their finger on the pulse of traditional television. Customers can record a virtually unlimited number of TV shows from satellite, cable or antenna and then search inside those TV shows to pinpoint television content of interest. Existing customers include government organizations, such as the U.S. Senate and the City of New York, to educational institutions at the university and K-12 level to entertainment organizations such as Comcast Entertainment, Current TV, and MTV.

###

Updated 11/03/2017: added new information on creating a TV headend in the Cloud.

Based out of Houston, SnapStream has been making TV distribution and recording products for over a decade.

TV Networks, TV Shows, Media/News sites , K-12 Schools, Government departments, Journalism colleges and dozens of local TV stations use SnapStream to distribute, record, search, clip and to post clips to Twitter/Facebook.

While most organizations are now looking to create their own digital TV head-end, there are still some who want to go the analog route. This article is for those customers.

New - How to create your own digital (IP) TV head-end in the Cloud

Why build my own cable head-end?

First of all, why would you want to build a cable head-end? Why not just take the regular cable signal from your cable provider and distribute that over RF around your organization? Well, for a lot of people “regular” cable (ie what you get without any kind of a receiver or set-top box) doesn’t include channels that are important to them. Regular cable might not include certain sports packages – like NFL Sunday Ticket or NBA League Pass on DirecTV – or other channels.

For example, say CSPAN is important to you. Well, here in Houston, TX, our local cable provider (Comcast) has been moving channels from the “analog” spectrum into the digital only spectrum and CSPAN has been one of the channels that’s been moved. So the only way to get CPSAN in Houston on Comcast is using a digital cable box (or a DTA – digital to analog – box). And if you want to distribute that channel around to various TVs in your office without a digital cable box at every TV, then you look at building your own regular cable head-end!

Another reason why you might want to modulate your own cable line-up is you might want to include non-TV channels on your cable line-up. For example, maybe you have a few security cameras that you want to modulate to certain channels on your cable system.

How do I build my own cable head-end?

So how do you create your own cable head-end? It’s surprisingly easy. Here’s a high-level overview of what your system will look like:

1. Your TV source is usually going to be either satellite (here in the US that means DirecTV or Dish) or digital cable. Depending on how many channels you’re modulating (‘n’ in the above diagram), you’ll need a corresponding number of receivers or set-top boxes from your provider. And if you’re using a satellite service like DirecTV, you’ll need a multi-port switch to drive all of those set-top boxes off of one satellite dish. A multi-port switch is a sort of splitter for satellite service.

2. Each set-top box is set to a particular channel on that TV source. Then that set-top box connects to it’s corresponding modulator via RCA video and audio cables. Generally speaking, analog modulators come in two varieties:

• "Channelized" modulators – this kind of modulator is hard-wired to modulate the audio/video passed into them to a particular channel # (ie to a particular frequency of the RF spectrum). You can’t change the channel number that it outputs on-the-fly.
• "Agile" modulators – with an Agile modulator, you can configure, on the fly, what channel you want it to output on. This provides more flexibility with the channels you can output on, but with some sacrifice of quality. Agile modulators are also more expensive (roughly twice as expensive) than "Channelized" modulators.

The typical recommendation, as I’ve heard it, is that most of your modulators can be “channelized” and then maybe you add a few “agile” modulators in case you need to modulate to some random channels later down the line.

3. And then each of the modulators connects to the combiner via RF and the combiner mashes all the channels together into one RF signal. There are two types of combiners – ones with amplifiers built-in (“active combiners”) and ones without amplifiers (“passive combiners”). Depending on how you’re distributing RF (the next step), an “active” combiner might save you the need for a dedicated RF amplifier on the output of the combiner.

4. Last but not least, you need to distribute your new cable signal throughout your organization. Designing an RF distribution system is a separate topic unto itself (discussion of splitters and taps, signal loss of distance, etc.), but for simple configurations, you just need to amplify the signal at the exit to the combiner. How much you need to amplify it depends on how many ways you’re splitting it and how long the distances are in your RF network.

If you’re doing all of this so you can record TV and search over it with SnapStream, your SnapStream Server is 100% compatible with your new custom cable line-up. We have the ability to create custom line-ups so your program guide in SnapStream exactly matches how you have your channels configured.

Ballpark Pricing

You’ll need to contact a vendor or distributor of this equipment, but our quick calculations had the per channel cost of the modulators and combiners (EXCLUDING the cost of any multi-port switch, receivers, and RF distribution stuff), if you’re using “channelized” (ie “fixed”) modulators, come out to $150 / channel. And if you’re going with “agile” modulators, then the cost might go up to something like $250 / channel. Now this is just eyeball pricing.

Ok now I have my own lineup, how can I record it?

If you are like most of our customers and want to record TV for strategic purposes SnapStream can help. Our appliance lets you record any TV feed (antenna, cable, satellite, IP or inhouse analog/digital feeds) on a centralized DVR. Once recorded we index all the closed captions making it possible for users to search inside shows. And once you've found what you are looking for there are easy tools tocreate a clip and then download it or to post it to Twitter/Facebook.

Conclusion

That's it... Thanks to my friends at Blonder Tongue for their help in putting this together. And if you're reading this and want to be able to record LOTS of TV and then search inside those TV shows, let us know. That's what our product, SnapStream, is all about!

Today, we're launching SnapStream TV Trends (http://www.snapstream.com/tvtrends/), a tool that allows you to track trends on national television here in the United States.

Enter a couple of keywords (up to 5) into TV Trends and you'll get a graph showing you the relative frequency of mentions of those words on mostly-news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN.

Here's an example comparing mentions of Twitter and Facebook on national TV:

(click the "SnapStream TV Trends" link on top to see a larger more detailed version the graph) So you can see Facebook was generally getting more mentions on national TV until February or March of this year when Twitter started taking over... and since then Twitter has consistently received more TV airtime than Facebook. And what about that big spike for twitter in mid-April? That was the whole Twitter/Oprah/Ashton Kutcher thing. Here's a comparison of mentions of tech giants Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo on traditional TV:

And the word 'yes' vs. the word 'no'?

TV Trends graphs can be embedded into your website or blog using the simple embed code underneath the graph or you can link to graphs by just copying the URL from your browser's address bar. And on the TV Trends site, you can view excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and you can filter the results by network (chart mentions of "Obama" on Fox or MSNBC) and by genre (show me mentions of "Obama" on comedy programs).

Another feature of TV Trends are hot and cold words... These are the top ascending (hot) and descending (cold) words on national television. For example, as I write this blog post, the top rising terms, the top hot words, are "north korea" and "two american journalists" -- references to the two American journalists that have been sentenced to hard labor in North Korea.

While many types of analytics are available for other media (see Compete, Alexa, Trendrr) until now, there hasn't been a way to track and analyze what's being said on traditional television. TV Trends attempts to offer some insight into the world of traditional "offline" television...

And behind the scenes, SnapStream TV Trends is powered by SnapStream's TV recording and search technology. SnapStream's TV search technology allows organizations to record LOTS of TV and then search inside those TV shows for mentions of their city government, "breaking news" on a competitive local TV station, an elected official, a natural disaster or anything else anyone might be looking for on TV. You can think of it like a cross between a DVR on steroids (one SnapStream Server can record 10 TV shows at a time) and a search engine. This technology powers TV trends and it's behind TV monitoring at organizations such as E!'s The Soup, XM Radio, NBC, Current TV, the U.S. Senate, University of Southern California, University of Texas, City of Austin, and the City of Chicago. If you use a clipping service or, worse, a bank of VCRs or DVRs, to keep track of what's being said on TV about your brand or whatever, you should give SnapStream Enterprise a look.

So try out TV Trends and let us know what you think! Post your questions and feedback here in the comments or on twitter (we're at @snapstream).

Just a short note to let you that the SnapStream Enterprise Blog has a new name: the SnapStream 'TV Searcher' blog. You can get directly to the renamed blog at:

https://blog.snapstream.com/

(And don't worry, any links you had to the blog will still work...)