At the risk of becoming the official "In memory of VHS!" blog, if you don't know what I'm talking about), here's another use for that old VCR when you replace it with a SnapStream Server or a SnapStream Mini:

In this article on Slate.com by Christopher Beam, it's mentioned that SnapStream got a nice shout-out at the Republican Party's Tech Summit last week:

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, a lot of our customers drop their VCRs and VHS tapes in favor of recording and searching TV with a SnapStream Server. So we end up seeing a lot of VCRs and VHS cassettes tapes. A whole lot.

SnapStream's ShowSqueeze lets you separately recompress any standard-definition (SD) or high-definition (HD) recording to either Windows Media (.wmv) or H.264. These formats offer the same great recording quality as the other formats in a fraction of the space. And when you're recording thousands of hours of television, this can be particularly useful.

The SnapStream development team is happy to announce availability of the 4.9.1 release for SnapStream Server customers. Much of the work was performed "under the hood," but there are a few big new features as well, among them:

Educators use television in the classroom to reinforce and expand on material being taught, increase student interest in learning and better address a variety of learning styles. The SnapStream Server puts TV in every classroom without having to wire each room with cable or supply each classroom with DVRs, VCRs and TVs. SnapStream TV search technology gives teachers the ability to search within TV recordings and pinpoint content of interest; then clip that content and download it, stream it right to the classroom, quickly and easily. Most importantly, teachers do not have to wait and rely on other people to do it for them.

I was deep in marketing-land on Thursday (also known as "writing a case study"), when I heard about the US Airways plane that crash-landed in the Hudson. I grew up in Houston, but lived in NYC for 5 years and moved back last year. I still have lots of friends there...so when I hear news like that coming out of NY I still feel like it's My News and it feels personal. Within minutes, my boss showed me that rescue picture that Janis Krums took from the ferry and posted to Twitter. I was really amazed by how quickly that picture got out. I watched as the number of "views" went from the dozens to the thousands. It was posted and cross-posted on lots of different blogs as the page views overloaded the Twitter server. Twitter is an amazing thing. I posted it to my Facebook page; I had friends in NY who learned of the plane crash from my Facebook post. Incredible.

In this half-hour podcast, Rakesh talks with Matt about how different industries - including entertainment programs like "The Soup" - are using SnapStream TV search servers, and why. Check out the podcast here:

The LA Times ran a story earlier this week about a big distributor of movies and TV shows dropping the VHS format.

Sometimes, we hear about cool and unexpected ways that our customers are using our TV search technology. This one example.