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
"I'm thankful for the love of my family and to be leading a successful company of awesome people during sketchy economic times."

Rakesh Agrawal, Founder and CEO
"I'm thankful for my two daughters, my wife and the rest of my family. And I'm thankful for my SnapStream co-workers who I enjoy working with... whether or not I'm in the office."

Rob Alexander, Software Engineer
"I am thankful for Star Wars Beta and Diablo Beta."

Zack Price, Manager of Quality Assurance
"I am thankful for working with a good group of friends. I'm also thankful for pictures of cats dressed up in little costumes."

Adrienne Gonzalez, Platform Engineer and Technical Support Rep
"I am thankful for having a wonderful family, awesome co-workers and finally getting some more rain."

Chris Wilkerson, IT Manager
"I am thankful for my newly rebuilt family, SSDs making computers faster and for the reboot of IT here at SnapStream."

Daniel Mee, Technical Support Rep
"The LogMeIn Rescue desktop application."

Jason Baumeister, Director of Development
"I'm thankful for Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers."

Josie Munoz, Accountant
"I am thankful for having such a big family. Their love and support has helped keep me strong, especially this year."

Michael Bui, Technical Support Rep
"Family, work, friends, etc."

Gerard Monier, Developer in Test
"I'm thankful for intellisense."

Joel Gabiola, Marketing Director
"I'm thankful for long weekends."

Elbert Pruitt Jr., Software Test Engineer
"I'm thankful for the good health of my fam."

Allen Moody, Technical Account Manager
"I am most thankful for my new job at SnapStream. I'm proud to be part of such an amazingly talented team."

Rachel Eichenbaum, Marketing Campaigns Manager
"I give thanks to Sprint for finally getting the iPhone and to the late Wilson Greatbatch who invented the cardiac pacemaker. "

Dear reader, what are you thankful for? Feel free to share in the comments.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

At some point in your computer-based life, you have probably experienced the wretched agony of software that doesn’t do what you think it should. You’ve probably clicked on a cryptic button, waited entirely too long for a task to complete, or accidentally activated the nuclear option that consigns all of your progress to digital oblivion. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These experiences are so ubiquitous that they have been given an official title, “Computer Rage." (Yes, it's in Wikipedia.)

You know it when you feel it. Your heart pounds and your face flushes. You grip your mouse tightly and communicate this displeasure to your machine verbally, regardless of whether or not it has voice recognition software.

Select Google image search results for "Computer Rage"

The much needed relief from your computer woes comes in the form of quality assurance, where we work to ensure that the software does exactly what it’s supposed to do. Within SnapStream, recording TV shows, creating clips, ShowSqueezing episodes, e-mailing TV alerts, and indexing media items are all tasks that have a very clear purpose and pattern of behavior.

They possess multi-faceted progressions of functionality and several layers of complexity which require intricate and multi-leveled testing to guarantee their performance. To safeguard you from Computer Rage, we dream up ways to turn that complexity on its head. We break the software so that you don’t have to.

To test the software from the inside, we attempt to walk a mile in your shoes, one inch at a time. We do this by asking specific “what if” questions:

“What if I attempt to delete a media item while it’s recording?”
“What if my drive fills up with recordings?”
“What if I schedule more recordings than I have tuners for?”

SnapStream has the answers to these questions because a tester has asked them. We then build the answer into the software by deciding what the reasonable expectation of the feature should be. Essentially, this consists of another round of questions. Shall we let the user swim at his own risk or be the heroic lifeguard who ensures the safety and stability of the system? Will the user expect this feature to operate in this manner, or will they wince in agony?

Eventually, we arrive at answers for these questions, and the answers become test cases. We decide that, in a certain case, the software should behave a certain way. As we accumulate test cases, the testing coverage of our software grows and the ability to test the larger picture opens up to us. Design paradigms become more pronounced. We test to ensure that new features behave in ways that are similar to the “personality” that users have come to expect from the software.

Ultimately, it’s this “personality” that makes for a great user experience. When you feel like you know what to expect from software, you feel more comfortable using it. Computer Rage be gone.

SnapStream isn't lacking for strange traditions, and this one certainly doesn't break that mold.

In the tradition of singing the blues in Adventures in Babysitting, no one leaves SnapStream without a Dance Central Dance Battle.

Watch the extended clip here, to catch my reference.

And who do we have here, but none other than the man, the legend, the one who takes it to the (PB)MAX, Percy Bell!

For those not in the know, Mr. Max was my office mate, testing cohort and friend of many years who worked at SnapStream until he followed love a few states away three years ago.

Happily, he remembered the good old times and paid us a visit on a recent trip to Houston.

By wearing his SnapStream t-shirt Superman style, he was still able to access the SnapStream lair. We took a tour of the office, highlighting some new additions from the office build-out to the additional racks in the test lab, and then met the some of the new SnapStreamers.

We even took a picture of the two of us in mock fisticuffs.... giving proper homage to all of the late night heated discussions we had about how feature X should work in the software.

Then it was time to say farewell, but as I said, ain't nobody gets out of this place without a dance-off!

One of the least recognized, yet most powerful features of SnapStream is the ability for our customers to create custom workflows by leveraging the software’s built-in API. The Application Programming Interface acts as a connector between different software programs, allowing them to interact with one another in a seamless fashion.

With SnapStream's API, the question of "can your software do this?" is now completely open-ended. Developers can create third-party applications that tightly integrate with SnapStream's TV search technology to accomplish almost anything imaginable. In layman’s terms, SnapStream’s API lets developers do cool things like:

• Create custom search portals
• Automatically create multiple versions of varying bitrate WMV or H.264 files (using our ShowSqueeze technology)
• Integrate with a Google Calendar to automatically schedule recordings on a closed-circuit camera

Densan Consultants, one of SnapStream’s custom code partners, has harnessed SnapStream’s API to create a customer-facing Web portal called NewsLink that allows the end user to search amongst TV transcripts (from two SnapStreams), a collection of 50+ federal government news publications, and newswires—all from a single, unified interface. Did I mention that the two SnapStream systems are located in two completely different regions of Canada?

View SnapStream in Canada in a larger map

With NewsLink, two SnapStreams are integrated along with EMM print sources and newswires.

The benefit with this approach is that this customer no longer has three independent tools by which they gather transcripts, news publications and newswire stories. Instead, the end-user simply launches his web browser, types in a search term, and voila, instant search results about what’s happening on CBC and Reuters.

TV Search + Print Search + Internet Search + Wire Search

Custom Web portal, searching SnapStream, EMM Print Sources and Newswires.

Perhaps the best part of the API: It's free to customers! To interface with the API, all you’ll need is a developer who's familiar with JSON Web Services, along with some ideas to implement. If you’d like to learn more about SnapStream’s API, and even look at sample code, just visit http://code.snapstream.com! You can consult with our engineering team as well by contacting us at sales@snapstream.com.

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.

Several of us SnapStreamers enjoy playing America's game, which involves neither a helmet nor pigskin, nor the trajectory of a wingless bird (cue avian grumbling). We like football and Angry Birds too, but this classic game is poker — No Limit Texas Hold'em to be exact.

You won't see us on this year’s World Series of Poker broadcasts on ESPN, but about once a month we wear sunglasses at night for our own main event, replete with quotes from the cult movie hit Rounders. Highlights from the first SnapStream Poker Night include:

Realizing we were in trouble when our lead tester Zack shuffled up like a dealer from The Bellagio, Zack sending two summer interns to the rail with a full house (Jacks full of interns), and...Zack earning consecutive first place wins. If the urban term ownage applies here, and it clearly does, then so does rematch!

Texas Hold’em is a game of situations that requires knowledge of hand probability, keen observation, a little math, and a lot of intuition. Many times you don’t know for certain if an opponent's hand is strong or weak, so you have to lead out with a bet to gain information, often with only a marginal hand yourself. Knowing how much to bet, and when, is key to success at the table.

If this game of calculated risk sounds a bit like a metaphor for business strategy or investing, then you’re onto something. Rewind to the mid-70s, when part of the money raised for a start up named Microsoft came from the founder’s poker winnings at Harvard. Here’s a passage from Bill Gates’s prophetic 1995 book, The Road Ahead:

"In poker, a player collects different pieces of information—who's betting boldly, what cards are showing, what this guy's pattern of betting and bluffing is—and then crunches all that data together to devise a plan for his own hand. I got pretty good at this kind of information processing."

Pretty good indeed (he says, 16 years later, from a PC running Win7 Pro)... Evidently, the kind of analysis Gates uses to arrive at a poker hand strategy is common to many professions requiring the ability to size up a situation. As an example from software testing, here are a few vectors from our lead tester’s playbook on preparing to test at SnapStream:

“What is the scope of this code check-in, what are the requirements and expectations, what are the boundary cases, performance considerations, security concerns etc? What’s the plan of attack?”

Tackling these and other fundamental questions sharpens our game by clarifying the situation and a course of action. We then play against the software to help strengthen it for our customers. If that sounds like fun, it is!

On that note, the SnapStream Series of Poker continues at the end the month, near Halloween. No doubt a few well-disguised A-games will be lurking at the table, behind some very unusual poker faces. May your full house be pleasantly haunted this autumn, and remember:

“You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle... but you can’t win much either.” - Mike McDermott (Matt Damon, Rounders)

As frequent readers of our blog know, we've written several posts about how to build your own digital cable headend (aka a QAM headend). And we've reviewed most of the products in the market, including our favorite the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM.

But I just recently learned about some new products in this area from Drake and they appear to have GREAT price points:

• Drake's HDE24 High Definition MPEG Encoder Module product (which also requires the Drake MEQ-1000): Again, each module handles one channel and with 2 modules per encoder host, the cost per channel works out to something like $1900 / channel. These modules DO have closed captioning support.

• Drake's DSE24 High Definition Signage Encoder product: One box handles one channel and appears to cost about $1,200 per channel (compare this to the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM which will run you about $3,000 / channel). Problem is that these units do NOT support closed captioning right now.

The only problem is we haven't tested either of these units yet in-house so we can't comment on video quality, stability, or other features. We're working on getting eval units in-house and once we do, we'll post more detailed reviews. Meanwhile, at least the HDE24/EH24 products appear to be VERY strong with all the necessary features and about 50% less than the Blonder Tongue product.

Raise your hand if you remember high school. Keep your hand raised if you remember how easily rumors started. Gossip spreads faster than a wildfire, and we in Texas know a thing or two about wildfires! He said, she said, they said, we said… who can keep up with it all? High school gossip is not unlike Hollywood gossip.

Today we’re going to talk about the music industry and how SnapStream is applicable in managing these “gossip wildfires” that are very difficult to control. As someone who has worked in the industry before, I can tell you from a firsthand experience how useful this kind of technology can be.

Oftentimes we’ll hear about Lady Gaga’s latest fashion statement before we've heard about a local news story. It’s how our society works. Us “common folk” love to talk about our famous friends-from-afar. We know more about Beyoncé than we do our city councilmen! So naturally, when something big happens in their lives, we all get to Facebooking, Tweeting and (for all you people stuck in the mid-2000’s) MySpacing, what we just heard on TV regarding these events.

Now here’s something to think about: What if you were Beyoncé’s public relations manager? What if it was your job to make sure everything said on TV about your client was accurate? Not to mention, you want to promote as much positive coverage as possible. Imagine how overwhelming that would be. How can one person manage to catch everything MTV, VH1, BET, CMT, NBC, CBS, ABC, and other stations broadcast? Ah, I’m so glad you asked that question. SnapStream is the answer!

(Click image to enlarge)

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, which I can agree with to some extent. But at the same time, there are some things you’d rather not have spread around about your client. I think the more accurate distinction would be: Publicity vs. Better Publicity. For example, if your client is Lady Gaga, you’d want to encourage ample press coverage of her meeting with President Obama about equality and human rights. She’s fighting for an amazing cause and this would strengthen her public image. However, if you were Britney Spears’s PR manager, you’d most likely want to keep the number of stories about her impromptu marriages, shaved head, failed drug tests, etc. (the “dark Britney years”) to a minimum.

With SnapStream, you can set up multiple channels to record 24/7 so you don’t miss a minute of air time on any channel you’d want to monitor. Then, using our powerful search technology that scans closed-caption data, you can simply type in the name of your artist and instantly see a list of any relevant mentions from literally thousands of hours of TV. Just like that! Plus, you’ll see a small excerpt of the text transcript, so you can browse through the gist of each TV show.

(Click image to enlarge)

Think of how much time that would save you and how much more efficiently you could monitor news coverage! You can even set up e-mail alerts to notify you every time your mentions occur—weekly, daily, hourly, or near real time. So next time you're out lunching with your client in Beverly Hills, away from the TV, you can relax knowing that SnapStream is on damage patrol. It will tell you immediately when the first spark of gossip ignites.

There you have it, an “Inside Look” from the “Inside Sales” guy here at SnapStream. Thanks for reading my blog, and feel free to ask me any more questions you may have at sales@snapstream.com. I will now send you off with this last piece of advice: As Smokey the Bear once said, “Only you can prevent forest fires, yet only SnapStream can prevent gossip fires.” Or... something like that.

Walking into my office here at SnapStream, I felt a different energy in the air. As I sat down at my desk, I watched my cube-mate watch an old interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from 2007. Around the corner, I can faintly hear our IT guy have a conversation with our head tester about what had transpired the night before: Steve Jobs died.

Last night, I was at a party and someone mentioned that Steve Jobs just passed away. I instantly pulled up the Apple Web site, ironically on an iPhone that Steve invented, and unfortunately found the rumors true. The confirmation of his passing affected me in a subtle but profound way. I come from a design background and always admired the artistry and detail that Apple brought to the tech space. Steve saved us from the beige and lifeless personal computing concepts and literally molded our technology future.

If media is a litmus test of cultural significance, today is a prime example. Witnessing the Tweets, YouTube tributes and searches on TV (what we do), there is an unlimited sense of gratitude for what Steve Jobs meant to millions around the world. When I started here eight years ago, I was pretty much the only Apple fanboy in the office. Now, it’s sort of a company ritual to watch the live feed of every Apple announcement.

Steve Jobs delivered nothing less than magic, a type of magic that transformed our culture, inspired discovery and amazed the kid at heart inside us all. Proving the impossible to be possible—that was the standard in his eyes and I can’t imagine the mediocrity we’d be living in if that wasn’t the case. I am very appreciative to experience the world that Jobs helped to mold. Maybe Steve’s inspiring messages, like his commencement speech to Stanford in 2005, will ensure that his inspiration will live on with us.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

It's that special time of year again at SnapStream. No, I don't mean Christmas, Flag Day, or even Talk Like a Pirate Day. I mean, Apple Product Announcement Day.

The Tradition

Going on three years now, we've celebrated in a very specific way.

The week before, with all of the scuttlebutt flying around the office, everyone carefully considers their position on each rumor so they can make their predictions.

Before the meeting, we take orders for Jimmy John's sandwiches and then fire up the big ol' conference room projector.

As the presentation starts, we lock in our final guesses for what will transpire. The wagers are only for in-office bragging rights, but still, if you get it right, that's six months of glory, until the next event.

Of course Apple doesn't live stream the actual video, so instead we pull up the live blog from Engadget, Mac Rumors or Gdgt. Those in the know will also bring a laptop or two and try to hit F5 quicker than the main machine, thus beating everyone else to the punch by four or five seconds. As the presentation goes on, we do our best Steve Jobs impression of how we're going to "love it" and about how "revolutionary it is." Here's hoping that Tim Cook rocks it Barnum-and-Bailey style and gives us a good circus.

So what do we expect for today? Well, there's even money on iPhone5 alone vs. iPhone5 + 4s getting announced. Sprint support seems to be a given. Other than that... it's all up in the air, we'll have to wait and see what happens.

If this sounds like a supersized DorkFest(TM), you're right... but it's also quite fun... and just another reason why I love working at SnapStream.