Hear ye, Hear ye. The contest is officially open. Let the name game commence! After you've read up on all of the technical specs of the 50-channel, world's largest DVR--or maybe just gotten the gist of it--rack your brain for what we could name this crazy thingamajig. Engadget is calling it a "Monster DVR." But can you come up with something more awesome? The best entry will win a free Apple iPad + case. Click here to enter.

(First time visitors: Welcome to SnapStream! We make TV search software used by organizations like the U.S. Senate and The Soup (on E!) to search inside TV shows. And it’s not too expensive, starting at $2,000. What’s TV search, you ask?  Visit our website to learn more.)

If you've read any of our previous articles on our monster DVR systems, you know we have a knack for throwing together skunkworks DVRs that can record a lot of TV. In the past, these have been done in the wee hours of the morning with parts we've scavenged from other systems.

 

Yup! This is what it looks like when you record 50 channels at once... (click to see it up close)

But... what would happen if we set out to make the World’s Largest DVR? And not from scrap parts, but with shiny new hardware and a real (gasp) budget? And while we're at it, let's not just go from 12 tuners to 13. Let's blow the doors off of television recording. Putting on my infomercial voice here, we're not doing 10, not 20, not 35, but 50…. Yes, FIFTY (50) TV channels at once. :-) And while we're at it, let's make a storage system to sit behind it that lets you keep all of those shows. Forever. Well, forever as long as you're willing to buy the drives to plug into the system. In total, the storage capacity is equivalent to 326 TiVo Premier boxes. But that might take up a little more space than our rack has, though.

Well, for the past little while we've been working on adding clustering capabilities to our TV recording and search software... technology that would enable us to go beyond the 10 TV tuners that we could put on a single PC motherboard. After planting the seeds for this new architecture last year, we've been working hard on getting this new version of SnapStream completed.

Well, spring has sprung and that seed sprouted into a 25U half rack packed to the gills with the most monster of DVRs ever created.

And we can't wait to introduce it at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas next week (April 12-15). If you'll be there, come check it out in person! (we'll be in the South Upper Hall in booth #2707)

 

The finished product... our 50 channel DVR + TV search engine. The largest in the world.

The juicy details:

 

World's largest DVR in the rack

TV Source: You plug it in with one simple coax cable feed from your local cable company.

In that regard, it's pretty normal. Of course, do you know of other DVRs that need two 15amp power plugs and a 10GB Ethernet (or up to 8 bonded 1GB ports) uplink? :-)

Tuners and Storage: It has a grand total of 50 analog TV tuners recording to 125+TB of storage. (10 tuners and 18TB of storage per 3U chassis or 10 tuners and 30TB storage of 4U chassis). As a demo, this system shows both of our 3U and 4U chassis sizes. Depending on the storage requirements, one could do all 4U or all 3U boxes.

Note: Due to the higher bitrates, if you were to do this with digital recording sources like QAM or ATSC, each server would only do 5 shows per box. You'd just need more boxes to get to 50 channels.

Clustering: The magic behind building a TV search engine like this one is our new clustering technology. With this setup, one SnapStream node is designated as the master and other SnapStream nodes which can then be designated to performed a narrow or broad set of functions (see diagram at the left). Then the "master" doles out work to be done to the various nodes it has at its disposal and balancing resources appropriately. For example, when using the SnapStream Link software to playback shows, each Link Client will request (under the hood, of course) the video in question directly from the server that houses the video file to prevent any duplicate network traffic.

Networking: Because this is a "distributed" DVR, the networking between the nodes is important -- this network meshes the nodes together, allowing them to talk to one another, use each others storage, etc. The interconnect on this SnapStream Cluster is via an HP Procurve 2910 switch, with two 1GB copper Ethernet ports bonded via LACP per server.

 

World's largest DVR from behind

Storage allocation: Using drive pooling, all of the storage shows up as one giant video folder... all 102TB of it! As a result of this, each system can record to either itself or other machines on the network as space allows. Our software handles all the magic of distributing recordings across the various logical storage volumes.

TV Search: And, of course, this giant SnapStream DVR cluster can not only record shows, but it makes them all searchable as well, using our powerful TV search technology. This is the same TV search technology that shows like The Soup (on E!) use to find their TV clips. With our clustering technology, there's one unified search interface all the recordings. With the storage capacity on this SnapStream, this means the ability to search about 115,200 hours of recorded TV... or about 13 years worth of TV recordings!

And then it gets even cooler....

Distributed Transcoding: For the uninitiated, ShowSqueeze is our built-in transcoding feature -- the feature that allows you to take recordings that are natively made in MPEG-2 and convert them automatically to H.264 or Windows Media. In the older architecture, each server could only ShowSqueeze up to the limit of the local CPU.

Anyhow, being limited to the CPU on one computer won't do for such a massive system, so in addition to scalable recordings and storage across nodes, we added scalable ShowSqueeze across nodes as well.

The base unit is a 1U dual-processor quad-core Nehalem Xeon server (8 physical, 8 logical cores) with a ton of ram. On the price to performance curve in a 1U space, this box is theperfect choice. It can do more than one ShowSqueeze from HD to HD h.264 in real time or can take eight analog shows at once and squeeze to an archival quality file. Under the hood, we have all of the software knobs to turn and buttons to push so you can optimize the performance of the box to the task at hand.

Assuming one box isn't enough, one could just add more SnapStream ShowSqueeze nodes. As additional ShowSqueeze boxes come online, the master SnapStream node will dole out any available tasks to them. And if a ShowSqueeze node is taken back offline and the master node automatically adjusts by moving ShowSqueeze tasks to the remaining nodes!

HD-SDI playout: To finish out our rack, we also threw in one of our HD-SDI playout nodes. (Once again, one can add as many as needed for your workflow.) For our traditional television customers like NBC, The Soup (E!), Current TV and MTV, being able to get SnapStream recorded shows to their HD-SDI video router is important.

Stats Quick View (Maximum Configuration):

*Assuming a recording quality of 2mbit/s.

Help us name the World's Largest DVR... and win an iPad:

We need a really cool name for this thing and we want your help! And the winning submission will get an Apple iPad - 16GB + Apple's iPad case/cover. Enter the contest here from April 9 to April 30.

And, as mentioned above, you can come see this thing live at the National Association of Broadcaster's (NAB 2010) show in Las Vegas. We'll be showcasing it in the South Upper Hall, #SU2707.

And, finally, some more pics:

(see them all on Flickr here)

"

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!

We took it to our TV Trends analytics to investigate the uptick of buzz surrounding the iPad, which hits the market tomorrow. The forecast calls for an explosive spike in the media frenzy as users get their hands on experimenting with the highly anticipated Apple tablet. This Wednesday's episode of Modern Family indicates that it's going to be a full-on mob scene. Brilliant stroke of product placement, I might add.

Let's conduct a side-by-side comparison next to other major tech product launches from recent history to see where the iPad stands. If I've missed any big debuts, you can plug in keywords yourself on the TV Trends database.

Tech Product Launches in Review

April 2, 2010 - Day before the iPad launches. Media index currently at 146.

January 27, 2010 - Coming of the iPad is announced. Media index shoots to 289.

January 5, 2010 - Google's Nexus One Phone premieres. Peak of 180.

October 22, 2009 - Launch party for Windows 7. Interest caps at 155.

November 11, 2008 - Google launches Gmail video chat. Reaching 147.

October 22, 2008 - Google's first Android phone, HTC Dream is released. Index is 77.

Based on our data history, the iPad is positioned to be the overwhelming winner in garnering extensive interest from broadcast media. We will continue to monitor how the world reacts to the iPad post-release.

Click the graph to manipulate the search and view specific channel sources.

Before we started tracking TV trends in October 2008, there are some prime dates from recent memory that would be cool to look at as a frame of reference. These hallmark technology events generate contagious excitement in the media.

July 11, 2008 - Nationwide launch of Apple's iPhone 3G.

November 19, 2007 - Amazon Kindle launches.

June 29, 2007 - iPhone is introduced into the United States.

January 9, 2007 - Apple's first iPhone model is announced.

Global DVD sales are projected to decline by 12% this year, compared to 9% in 2009, according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics in Home Media Magazine. Even with Blu-ray expected to rake in $6.5 billion in worldwide sales, it won’t be enough to sustain or regain the industry’s momentum.

No surprise here, with all things digital these days. At SnapStream, we have been early proponents of digital media delivery. The same way iTunes flipped the music industry; DVR and VOD technology are changing the game for Hollywood, which has been slower on the uptake. It’s time to get with the program.

Going digital is right on track with going green; it’s like going paperless. And who has the space for masses of old CDs and DVDs, right? Upload this stuff to your SnapStream archive of however-many-terabytes and eliminate the needless clutter. Reinvent it.

Following this eco trend, every week, I’ll be featuring unique recycled art made out of the nostalgic discs of yesteryear.

If you come up with something cool, send me a pic and I’ll post it! rachel@snapstream.com

Learn how Plymouth Public Schools streams TV

Join the conversation at our webinar next Wednesday with Rich Trudeau, director of technology for the Plymouth Board of Education. He'll be logging in with us to co-host “Streaming TV into your School” on March 31 @ 2:30 PM CST. (That’s 3:30 EST/12:30 PST.)

Rich will share his thoughts on media delivery and streaming TV. It’s a real treat when we get to bring a current customer into the mix, live and ready to interact. It makes things more three dimensional for the attendees and also opens up the floor for discovering how SnapStream flows into real-world application.

The setup at Terryville High School in Rich’s district allows 50 classrooms to connect with the SnapStream Server over the LAN. From their PCs, teachers can record the freshest-airing educational content and search by keyword to pinpoint subject-related programs.

Teachers at Terryville can then create focused clips, or stream the full-length programs into their classroom activities. Up to 10 channels can DVR at one time, so conflicts don’t ever occur, and everything is stored in a shared video library that holds 2,000+ hours. No more bulky VHS and DVD archives!

One year out with SnapStream, Rich tells us that teachers in his district are “definitely integrating it into their plans books” and are “more than happy with it.”

To hear more from Rich Trudeau, consider joining us next Wednesday, March 31. Sign up here.

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.

Baseball junkies rejoice! Today we announced MLB Network as the newest SnapStream customer. If you love baseball as much as I do, you're familiar with MLB Network. Spring training is around the corner. I wonder if they have any news about my Astros...

press release:

MLB Network Chooses SnapStream to Monitor and Search Television

Houston TX, (PRWEB) February 22, 2010 - SnapStream Media, Inc. announced today that MLB Network, the ultimate television destination for baseball fans, will install SnapStream's TV search technology to monitor the competitive landscape, showcase their on-air marketing executions, and support business development efforts by providing the company with competitive intelligence.

“We will be taking aired content and creating packaged distribution to advertisers, affiliates, and for national and local marketing opportunities,” said Mark Haden, MLB Network’s VP of Engineering and IT. “We had used a variety of methods and SnapStream will allow us a single solution. The user interface is very intuitive and to be able to search using a published program schedule is very slick.”

“MLB Network is one of the most forward-thinking players in the industry,” said Rakesh Agrawal, Founder and CEO of SnapStream. “Having chosen SnapStream over a number of alternative solutions, including building a custom solution in-house, ultimately SnapStream made the cut because we offer a turnkey solution and an ease-of-use that is unmatched in any other product or solution, which re-affirms SnapStream as the optimal way for government, education and entertainment organizations to monitor television.”

The SnapStream TV search solution to be deployed at MLB Network will allow staff to centrally record and archive 4 channels of television; then subsequently search those recordings and create clips.

Visit the http://www.snapstream.com/ website to learn more about SnapStream's affordable and effective TV search technology

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 11/3/2017: 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.