Trial evidence can take many forms. Expert testimony. Eyewitness accounts. Documents and photos. Maybe even the occasional surveillance video. In light of the recent impeachment trial of Former President Donald J. Trump, it appears we may be entering a new era in the way cases are made and defended.

The video highlight reel.

Last week, both sides made extensive use of video clips to make their respective cases. In the days leading up to the trial, much was made about never-before-seen footage from inside the Capitol that would further the prosecution’s case. Congressional leaders used video moments taken during the insurrection of the Capitol alongside video clips of the speech the president was making on the Ellipse outside the White House that same day. In doing so, the prosecution used different types of video footage to provide context to the days and hours leading up to—and immediately following—the events of January 6.

Not to be outdone, the defense had its own clip montage prepared. 

Attorneys for Former President Trump showed highlights of various Democratic political figures using the word “fight” at events and in TV appearances in an attempt to demonstrate that the same rhetoric was being used on both sides of the aisle. Even news media weren’t exempt from inclusion in this (by many accounts) overly long compilation. Just ask CNN’s Chris Cuomo.

But so what? Based on the vote counts, it’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as political theater. Why does the reliance on video clips during the trial matter?

The answer is two-fold. Belief and context.

Seeing is Believing, Right?

We believe what we see. More than that, we rely on creating shared truths from the things we can see, document, and share with others. The widespread accessibility of video means we can share more moments with more people than at any other time in human history.

Without video proof, we wouldn’t get to collectively experience the joy of a child seeing his mother or father coming home from deployment. Or the terror of the first plane hitting the Twin Towers. And we certainly wouldn’t know that a police officer held his knee on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. 

Video gives us all the ability to see the moments we would otherwise miss.

But…(you knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?)

Just because we see the same thing, doesn’t mean we walk away with the same conclusions. While there is truth in the notion of believing what we see, it’s equally true that we see what we believe. Humans are naturally predisposed to confirmation bias. We give more weight to pieces of evidence that prove what we already believe to be true, regardless of whether it’s actually true. And this also pushes us to discard new evidence that flies in the face of our existing beliefs, particularly when emotionally charged issues are at hand. 

Which is precisely what Trump’s defense was relying on. That they could use video to tap into the inherent biases of enough of the Senate to get an acquittal. Their video didn’t have to convince so much as it just had to further prove what their intended audience already believed.

Content Isn’t King. Context Is.

This all begs the question - what’s the point of video proof? If we all just seek out our own echo chambers and bend evidence to match our existing beliefs, is visual storytelling equal to shouting into the ether?

Not when video clips are layered with other forms of coverage to create deep context. The footage of the siege on the Capitol could mean any number of things. That is, until it’s contextualized with tweets and statements from the president. And correlated with the timing of statements made leading up to and throughout the day of the insurrection. 

But all is in the eye of the beholder. Trump’s defense accused the prosecution of manipulating the various layers of information used to create context around the events of January 6. And then showed a lengthy reel of so-called evidence that was purposefully light on context to essentially demonstrate that  — since everyone is a guilty party—no one can actually be found guilty.

And that’s the duality of video moments. They can be used to both enhance and hinder understanding. But either way, video clips are the new shared language and how they’re placed in context becomes the most impactful part of an argument.

As our communications continue to become both more visual and more bite-sized, one’s ability to effortlessly thread video highlights into the discussion will become essential. This is true whether you’re trying to win a debate on Twitter or you’re trying to convict or acquit the (formerly) most powerful person in the world.

Video connects us. From lighthearted TikToks and Zoom happy hours to the sobering images from Black Lives Matter protests and the insurrection at the US Capitol, moments captured in video drive our conversations and shape our opinions.

The social isolation and turmoil of 2020 only reinforced the importance of meaningful connection and shared experiences. While we continue to be physically isolated from each other, journalism and technology have kept us current and engaged with the world around us. Reliable information has been crucial in the face of an ongoing global pandemic and tumultuous political climate.

However, bias and misinformation has called journalism’s ability to provide impartial, transparent information into question. With the very definition of truth up for debate, we saw a meaningful increase in video usage and viewership as people looked for ways to validate the news with their own eyes.

More Video Means More Video Clips

At SnapStream, we saw increases across all our usage metrics in 2020 - from video recording and search to clip production and social sharing. 

SnapStream customers created 25% more clips compared to the prior year, with a significant uptick in the months preceding the presidential election. News outlets, think tanks, and other media providers leveraged key moments to inform and persuade voters as they navigated a relentless influx of both facts and fiction.

SnapStream Clips Created 2020 v. 2019

Tweets Featuring Video Improve Engagement by up to 3X

According to Reuters, “[2021] will be a year when text-based newsrooms invest more heavily in online audio and video content, in data journalism, as well as the snackable visual ‘stories’ that work well on social media.” 

We already know people rely on social media to get their news. More than 70% of Twitter users say they use the network to stay informed. In 2020, the number of tweets posted with SnapStream featuring a video clip increased nearly 100% over the prior year. 

SnapStream Tweets with Clips 2020 v. 2019

Tweets including video clips proliferated for a simple reason - they perform. Readers are far more likely to engage with social content powered by video proof.

Tweets with video receive:

• 2X more likes

• 3X more retweets

• 2.5X more replies

Video proof gives the reader a level of context for the information they’re consuming that quotes or static images can't match. As Graham Lampa of the Atlantic Council says, “Bite-sized pieces of easily consumable video content come packaged with incisive commentary that situates the source material within a broader political, cultural, and journalistic context.” 

This tweet sent via SnapStream by Oliver Darcy generated ~500K engagements and 8.6M views

What's in Store for 2021?

The pandemic and concerns about misinformation during 2020 has altered how we interact with the world. We've seen that these themes will continue well into 2021, which will keep journalism and news at the forefront. We expect usage of and engagement with video moments to continue to accelerate as video can uniquely help newsmakers deliver their audiences vital context quickly and maintain the engagement and connection we all crave.

Video clips are rapidly transforming the way political and cultural commentary is generated and circulated. Statements and actions by prominent figures that might have otherwise gone unnoticed and unremarked upon after being aired just once or twice on cable television are now increasingly being identified, surfaced, commented on, and spread around online.

This new phenomenon of video clip-based online journalism and commentary is bootstrapping a new kind of scaffolding better suitable for our more rapidly responsive public discourse. Video clips shared on social media are enabling a richer and more accessible many-to-many conversation about today’s most pressing issues of social concern that goes well beyond what the one-to-many medium of cable television can facilitate.

In the seemingly ever-increasing pace of the modern world, the question is not only whether trusted media outlets can keep up but also whether their audiences even have the time and attention necessary to keep themselves broadly informed as citizens. Combine this with users' growing expectations for interactivity and having their own say and conditions are ripe for a video clip-powered revolution in how people inform themselves—and one another—about the world around them.

Online media pioneer John Battelle has noted that linear cable television seems intent on keeping eyeballs glued to the screen all day long. His new venture, Recount Media, seeks to give people the information they need and to give them back their time.

“What you can’t do,” Battelle said in a recent interview with Paul Blanchard on the Media Masters podcast, “is set out to waste your audiences’ time, which is exactly what video journalism does both online—think YouTube—and offline in linear television.”

“Without the ability to quickly assess, with your own eyes, using the most powerful medium we’ve come up with—which is digital video—the national dialogue is suffering,” Battelle says. “What you have instead are these sort of endless yell fests on television… they tend to push people into confirmation bias bubbles or worse.” Recount Media, he says, was founded in part to reimagine the “manufacturing process for video journalism” and employs short video clips to quickly provide its audiences the news and context they need, at the time of their choosing, and in the places they tend to gather.

A key platform for such short-form video journalism is Twitter and one of the most prominent leaders in this space is journalist Aaron Rupar, a close friend. Rupar has helped establish the “Twitter video clip thread” as an entirely new and uniquely impactful form of media content while simultaneously helping him to grow his Twitter audience to over 600,000 followers. Rupar takes a clip, contextualizes it from a sharp political perspective, and sends it out into the world.

The video clip thread fundamentally transforms its source material—often hours and hours of cable television coverage of political speeches—into an entirely new product that is quickly scannable, watchable, and shareable. Bite-sized pieces of easily consumable video content come packaged with incisive commentary that situates the source material within a broader political and cultural context.

Video clips are not only highly consumable, they are now also highly producible. The relatively recent availability of easy-to-use online tools like SnapStream helps make working with video content more like editing text than editing video. Neither Rupar nor I anticipated our mutual adoption of video as a primary medium for our work—when he and I first met over 15 years ago, I was the editor of our college newspaper and he was preparing himself for a career in print journalism. SnapStream allows us word-oriented content creators to easily and quickly produce video-based content en masse. For example, almost half of Rupar’s more than 12,000 tweets in 2020 contained video content, up from just 8% in 2017.

At my own organization, the Atlantic Council (a Washington, DC-headquartered, non-profit, non-partisan think tank with significant international reach), I have similarly led an effort to derive greater value from our own most plentiful resource—hours and hours of traditional think tank panels—by distilling these often highly academic, niche policy conversations into more engaging Twitter video threads. Since going fully remote in March this year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Council has hosted some 370 public online events.

My very first application of Rupar’s SnapStream-powered technique (a Twitter video thread covering HR McMaster’s final speech as National Security Advisor, hosted at the Atlantic Council in April 2018) went viral and smashed all existing engagement records for Twitter at my organization. The Atlantic Council has since adopted this method to better publicize its own events and the ideas they generate, clipping and tweeting the statements of speakers live as they are happening. The McMaster thread generated over a half million impressions through more than 300 retweets. This was the most Twitter engagement the Council had generated on any given day—five times the daily peak for impressions in the preceding three months. User retweets of our thread distributed our exclusive video content beyond our own audiences and also helped spark additional media interest in the speech amongst the traditional media. The speech was mentioned in roughly 1,000 media hits within the first 48 hours, including top-tier media outlets such as the Washington Post, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox.

The Atlantic Council's use of live video clips shared to Twitter builds value because it leans into the organization's greatest strength—being able to convene prominent world leaders in highly-produced public events. By generating organic engagement around our content on Twitter, the organization can regularly boost our own events' hashtags into the trending list on Twitter, giving our content much greater visibility. On average and consistently over time, the Atlantic Council's tweets containing video clips generate more than two times the engagement of tweets without video clips.

One of the most successful single clips the Atlantic Council has ever tweeted featured Canadian Prime Justin Trudeau speaking about youth leaders. This one video clip—served up as a standalone tweet that received over 1,300 likes and 400 retweets—delivered on a key policy goal for the event in a way that no research paper, study, or panel discussion could. We reached our actual target audience of young people living in Europe and North America where they congregate (on social media), captured their attention, and delivered our message that, in the words of Trudeau, “young people must actively shape the future by the things they do today.” The clip also helped make our #NATOEngages hashtag trend locally in London, where we hosted the event in December 2019, helping leverage popular appeal to focus greater attention on the often inscrutable topics of international affairs and alliances.

Why is this content format so uniquely engaging? Three main factors make the Twitter video thread uniquely impactful on the news consumer and the online media ecosystem.

First, the combination of textual commentary layered on top of the original source video simultaneously provides a kind of self-reinforcing justification of newsworthiness. Don’t believe the journalist’s commentary? Watch the video. Don’t understand why the video matters? Read the commentary for more context.

Second, when any given tweet from a video clip thread is shared on by any given user, the entire thread of content is discoverable by their followers—not only the video clip tweet that caught the original user’s interest. Each additional user may find an entirely different clip that they find worthy of sharing on, contributing to the strongly viral nature of such content. While the Atlantic Council doesn’t post the enormous engagement numbers that my friend Aaron Rupar does, the Atlantic Council’s “McMaster moment” demonstrates that even a wonky think tank playing it down the middle can also punch above its weight online by effectively leveraging video threads to advance its impact as an organization.

Third, and perhaps most vitally, Twitter’s “quote tweet” feature allows the recirculation of the underlying source content with each additional user’s commentary layered on top and spread yet further. For example, Rupar’s video tweets have been quote tweeted, on average, 15 times more than his non-video tweets. In 2017 when Rupar first began using SnapStream, his video tweets outperformed non-video tweets in quote tweets by 40 times, helping him build his following early on). This new video clipped scaffolding for public discourse is being built quote tweet by quote tweet.

Why does all of this matter?

Although social media is often (and rightfully) blamed for creating information bubbles, I would argue that the self-evident nature of video—combined with layers upon layers of political and cultural commentary—is actually contributing to a greater circulation of ideas and viewpoints across and among political constituencies. People don’t only react to video clips by liking or retweeting them—they’re engaging in conversation themselves by using these clips as the basis for their own political and cultural commentary.

For journalists, media outlets, and other organizations seeking broad audiences for their content, video is a uniquely powerful way to connect with end users. Tools like SnapStream make it possible to produce short-form video content at the scale necessary to “feed the beast” and keep audiences coming back from more.

We’re excited to announce SnapStream 9.6, which adds support for recording audio-only streams and includes more than 80 bug fixes and stability improvements delivering increased uptime and a smoother experience.

Learn more about recording and clipping audio-only streams in this video:

We are also extending the streams free trial so you can record streams for free longer (for all customers on 9.5 or 9.6).

Schedule Upgrade to 9.6

These newest features are available as a software upgrade to your SnapStream. Want to start using them? Have your administrator schedule an upgrade.

SnapStream’s support team will perform the upgrade via a remote session that usually takes an hour.

In our Customer Spotlight series, we highlight SnapStream customers and the important work they are doing.

With the world at our fingertips, it’s more important than ever to know what news you can trust. Launched in May 2004, D.C. based Media Matters for America is dedicated to stopping the spread of misinformation in the U.S. media. In order to monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation,  MMFA produces both rapid-response pieces and long-form, analytics-based research.

It’s imperative for the MMFA team to be able to effectively monitor, analyze and quickly report on media bias. By recording and monitoring a gamut of TV channels using SnapStream, Media Matters can live tweet and point out disinformation or misleading news (through a host of popular Twitter accounts), quickly reaching their nearly half a million followers on @MMFA twitter account and even more through the Twitter accounts of staff members. For longer form articles, the transcriptions generated by SnapStream provide a basis for analysis.

Here are some examples of the type of content MMFA produces.

A rapid-response video tweet

A longer form research study using analytics from SnapStream

We are proud of the work that MMFA is doing bringing accountability to media and look forward to continuing to support them in their mission.

Since graduating recently from Rice University, guest writer Juliette Richert is continuing her education by listening to as many podcasts about politics, culture, and society as she can get her hands on.

Much of America wondered how we were going to process two presidential town halls that replaced the cancelled debate during the 2020 presidential campaign. In response, the Gregory Brothers, in collaboration with Darren Criss, used video effects to create “an alternate reality,” where the opponents sang their arguments to each other. These melodies were created by “songifying” found footage, which is the process of applying audio pitch correction to the spoken voice to make it sound like music. The video gives you a pretty good idea of what both candidates discussed in reality (at their separate town halls), and the music is likely to get stuck in your head.

This unique work is a product of a decade of practice and has attracted a following of more than 3 million.  Browsing their YouTube channel is like walking through a library of past internet culture from memorable moments in US politics to iconic memes. The group, which includes Evan, Michael, Andrew, and Sarah Gregory, are foremost musicians, but their distinctive music videos that tie together comedy and current events have turned heads. Evan Gregory of The Gregory Brothers attributes their success to finding their voice. On your path to success, “finding your voice” may feel like a vague, overwhelming goal, but Evan gave us some insight into how you can find your voice and what makes you unique, too. 

1. Get your reps in. 

When you’re figuring out what you’re going to be good at, it’s going to take a lot of practice. If you want to make music, make a lot of music and then make some more. Producing a lot of videos over a long period of time has given The Gregory Brothers  practice and perspective to figure out what they like and what they want to be good at.  

The team has refined their process to be as efficient as possible. Before a big event, like a presidential debate, the group has a fair idea of what will be discussed (climate change, coronavirus, etc.), so they write a script and do pre-recordings with their guest. During the event itself, two of them, usually Evan and Michael, will watch the debate and take notes, sending messages to the other, about which clips from SnapStream they might want to use. They listen for moments where someone says something notable or speaks musically, making it easier to “songify.” They didn’t come up with this process overnight, rather it’s a result of countless hours of practice. 

2. Better done than perfect. 

Rather than focusing on getting everything perfect, it’s best to not get overwhelmed with perfection. If you’re going to make a lot in order to “get in your reps,” there may be times where you don’t hit the mark. Defining what is most important to you and focusing on that (more on that below), may be helpful in coping with a loss of perfectionism. 

3. Define your guiding principles.

The Gregory Brothers put their creative process first. Though it’s gratifying to see that millions of people liked their videos, they’ve decided that it’s most important to make sure their music sounds good.

First and foremost, they always aim to create high quality music. If you listen to their music from the 2020 presidential campaign, the group wants you to feel like you’re listening to an album that “captures a snapshot of their aesthetic” and accurately reflects the essence of today’s political movers. 

This leads us to their next priority, which is to accurately reflect reality. For example, watching their video of the cancelled debate will give you a pretty good idea of both presidential candidate’s arguments with a comical take. It might be easy to fall into the trap of thinking of their work as educational, a label which Evan rejects, as not to venture into the realm of journalism. They always want their videos to be interesting, frequently using comedy to heighten an opinion or statement. In Evan’s words, "comedy speaks truth and highlights things that are not spoken about." Though rarer than their comedic feats, the brothers use their process to highlight poignant events, like this speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

4. Build your expertise one area at a time.

Coming from a musical background, the group's video expertise has been entirely self-taught. In order to manage this learning curve while still producing, Evan described his incremental approach to self-education. Currently, he’s mastering video effects and creating video worlds, exemplified below where Darren Criss appears to sit at a table with Joe Biden. Evan’s next goal is to dive deeper in cinematography, which has become one of his long term goals. The progression of the group’s videos tells a story of the progression of their expertise. Looking at their earlier videos, you can tell when they were working on green screen effects versus now where they integrate green screen effects quite effectively. By choosing to get really good at one thing, they have been able to integrate new forms of tech and video production, from efficiency tools like SnapStream which makes it easy to find, edit, and share the most important video moments to creative video effects, without getting overwhelmed. 

5. Attract your audience.

The Gregory Brothers’ videos are designed like any good song, which keeps you coming back to hear it again. It’s “rewatchability,” a term coined by Evan, that draws their audience back for more. If you’re like me, their songs will be stuck in your head for days at a time. Because their tracks are designed to be listened to repeatedly, they’re able to benefit from multiple revenue streams. You can find them on Spotify and iTunes, as well as YouTube. They’ve found a way to hook their audience by using video. People come for a funny video and stay for the jams.

The Gregory Brothers have amassed a following of more than  3 million by focusing on an authentic creative practice, motivated by their desire to make high quality music. By venturing into video, which they knew little about when they began experimenting 10 years ago, they stumbled onto something great and found a career. Finding your voice will take time and might be messy, but the risk is worth the reward.

Since graduating recently from Rice University, guest writer Juliette Richert is continuing her education by listening to as many podcasts about politics, culture, and society as she can get her hands on.

Given Aaron Rupar’s half a million Twitter followers, his work is obviously popular, but why? As a millennial, I haven’t turned on cable TV in more than 5 years. Like much of my generation and the country, I get my news from the Internet and social media. Using short videos to share news stories on his Twitter feed and in his writing with Vox, Rupar connects Internet and social media users to the world of TV watchers, shedding light on the filter through which much of America receives news and information.

In 2017, Rupar was working as a journalist with Center for American Progress and had only a couple of thousand followers. That number has since soared after his “John Kelly” post (as seen below) was retweeted more than six thousand times, the most retweets he had received up until that point. This successful tweet propelled Rupar from a meager 4K Twitter followers to nearly half of a million, a 10x increase in followers over the past 3 years.

John Kelly on Fox

Rupar is now an associate editor for politics and policy at Vox, an avid Twitter user, and self-labeled liberal. He’s refined his beat from politics to primarily Congress, the Republican party, and Trump. Rupar publishes short pieces for Vox nearly every day, designed to give context around current events. His quick response time, sense of humor, and easy-to-read writing style make Rupar a strong reporter. Rupar’s Twitter feed, which he updates more than 30 times a day, has a critical and often satirical take on politics and the White House.

His most popular tweet from each thread gives a brief look at what people found interesting or important, but his long threads give you the chance to dig into the details of the event minute-by-minute, without ever having to watch the whole thing. Rupar’s Twitter feed is fun to explore, and you can easily get lost in rabbit hole-threads. Along with entertainment value, his work provides access to video that many people might not see otherwise.

Scrolling through Rupar's feed

Rupar’s time on Twitter and his success as a journalist at Vox have a symbiotic relationship. His Twitter following has helped Vox by indirectly growing their audience and increasing traffic. In order to make his Twitter threads, Rupar has to trim down longer videos. This process allows Rupar to engage with news as he live-tweets and construct rough outlines of his written pieces for Vox. In his writing, Rupar frequently uses short videos pulled from his Twitter-feed to contextualize the topic, providing audio and visual context that is difficult to replicate with words alone.

“With Trump everything is a spectacle, so it lends itself to video.” - Aaron Rupar

Videos provide context for the viewer to experience and understand the news, according to Rupar. Rupar’s discovery of SnapStream in 2017 was well-timed with the presidency. Trump is the most frequent face seen on Rupar’s feed (rivaled now only by his new daughter, Mia). Trump’s wild oratorical style and polarizing statements certainly help Rupar catch the attention of his audience. However, Rupar is confident that when Trump leaves office (whether that be in 4 more years or a couple months), there will still be high demand for news clips on Twitter.

“It’s one thing to have an opinion on politics, but if you have the video with it…people like to see people saying things” - Aaron Rupar

Why are some people ditching TV and paying attention to shorter clips of news? News consumers feel pressed for time and are exhausted by the current news cycle, so shorter clips are a quick way to consume news. If a video isn’t interesting enough, I’ll skip around to find the highlights. Rupar basically does that work for you.

Social media is also crafted to keep us moving down the feed, consuming as many posts as possible. Instead of competing with other TV stations, reporters now compete with puppy videos and memes for their audience’s attention. Best to make your post eye-catching and to-the-point in order to grab back their attention. Plus, there’s something priceless about seeing things for yourself.

President Trump at a rally in September

Video isn’t going anywhere because it gives you and your audience the ability to make up your own mind. How are you giving your audience the context they deserve?

We’re excited to roll out our newest SnapStream 9.5 release, which is focused on enhanced streams support with live transcription and Slack integration. At a high level, SnapStream 9.5 allows you to:

• Easily add streams and create specific events to record
• View and search live transcriptions from the added streams
• Share a clip directly to Slack
• Geo-lock posts to Twitter and Facebook

Streams & Events (With Live Transcription)

(Note: Only available as a part of SnapStream Cloud.)

One of our long-term focuses is helping our customers to expand their content sources within SnapStream. SnapStream 9.5 is the first step in that process by letting you directly add and manage your own RTMP or HLS streams. This can be great if you want to:

• Record and clip specific events, such as a press conference
• Easily add press pool feeds and other live and breaking news feeds, such as CNN Newsource, AP Video Hub or Reuters Video
• Record and clip your Zoom events, meetings and webinars
• Add, record, and search a 24/7 news stream channel, such as CBSN or YouTube Live channels
  

Many of our customers want to quickly grab a stream to record and clip a specific event, such as a press briefing or an event that may not be available on national news broadcasts. So we also added the ability to create scheduled events for your streams as well. If you want to record an event happening next Tuesday from 2PM to 3PM, you can schedule it on any stream you setup in SnapStream.

Live Transcription

Our Streams & Events feature now enables Live Transcription. Since not all streams carry caption information, SnapStream can create those transcripts in real-time. Not only does this allow your event to be searchable later, but it makes real-time live clipping easier. SnapStream includes this transcript data when you publish clips to social media so your clips show captions when they auto-play as a user scrolls through Twitter or Facebook. 

When you upgrade to 9.5, you get 30 days to test out Streams & Events completely free. Add as many streams as you want and record as many events as you need. We also provide 10 hours of free live transcription per month.

Learn more about Streams & Events

Recording a Zoom call in SnapStream only takes a few clicks

OTT channels like CBSN can now be added to SnapStream for clipping

Clip to Slack

One of the things we heard from a lot of customers is that they’d love to be able to share clips in Slack. Many of you create clips in SnapStream and collaborate with them with other members of your team to decide if and how to use them. Maybe a few of you want to decide if that’s the right clip to post to social media or to your website. Plus, just about every team is on Slack so it just makes sense to share clips directly there!

Geolock social media posts

Many of our customers need to ensure that their posts are only displayed in specific countries or excluded in specific countries. SnapStream 9.5 now supports geolocking posts to Twitter and Facebook. You can select specific countries where to show the posts or where to exclude the posts.

Speed enhancements & more

We’ve also made performance upgrades to our SnapStream Cloud product. Cloud customers, particularly those with a larger number of users, should notice faster speeds when publishing clips to social media. SnapStream 9.5 has many other bug fixes and improvements. Read the full release notes.

Schedule Upgrade to 9.5

These newest features are available as a software upgrade to your SnapStream. Want to start using them? Have your administrator schedule an upgrade.

SnapStream’s support team will perform the upgrade via a remote session that usually takes an hour.

Visiting Sequoia National Park! 

Yo, it's that day where we showcase a super cool person that we get to work with every day. Meet our numbers enthusiast, Gayan: 

How did you find SnapStream?

In 2012, I was in the last year of my MBA and was attending a career fair. Most of the students were flocking to the big gas company booths but I wasn't too interested in working for a large company. I spotted SnapStream with a cool booth and more importantly, no line. I decided to go see what it was all about and came away thinking "Wow, that's a very cool product!". I later found out I had a connection with Rakesh (SnapStream's CEO) since he was an advisor to the startup incubator I was working at as an Operations Analyst, so I applied. After a couple of rounds of interviews, I joined the team!

What is your role here?

Senior Marketing Program Manager

How have you grown with SnapStream?

I've grown quite a bit. For a start, I’ve grown laterally from all the snacks in the office! :) Jokes apart, SnapStream was my first job in the U.S. since moving here for my MBA. I’m originally from Sri Lanka where I studied Chemical Engineering and had my own startup making e-learning software but moved here to pursue higher education. I first joined SnapStream as a Sales Engineer and whenever they needed help managing a team, I would step in. I liked working with Sales and Engineering because you work both in the technical side and with customers. I had the opportunity to move into an Analyst role and work with Sales and Marketing, which was great because numbers have always been my passion. I now work completely in marketing and do lead generation, digital marketing, and analytics. I have a lot of fun with the technical things I’m working on now and I’m very happy with how I’ve been able to pursue my passion here at SnapStream.

What is your favorite thing about SnapStream?

Absolutely the PEOPLE, we have a big commitment to our culture. Even when times change, things get busy, and life gets hard, we are always consistent in our culture. A lot of startups start to lose their roots as they grow large, but we’ve always kept that playful and relaxed startup feel. We have the right environment for our people to blossom. This commitment to people was really evident when COVID happened. We were one of the first companies in Houston to move to a remote structure and have done a ton to help employees navigate this really strange time we are in.

What do you like to do when you aren’t at SnapStream?

I spend a lot of time with my 2-year-old daughter. She’s loads of fun and it’s incredible to watch her grow. I also have a variety of hobbies. My wife and I used to travel all the time and so far have visited 20 national parks (our plan is to start again and visit all 62 parks). We have a map framed in our living room with flags that mark where we have been. I’m also into cryptocurrency; I’ve lost more money than I’ve made, but it’s a very cool concept that I follow closely. I play a lot of video games, especially city simulators, transport simulators, and warship simulators. Recently, I’ve been into water cooling my PC. It's a huge money pit but it's super fun since it’s basically a never-ending engineering project.

Gerard visited the battlements of Blarney Castle during his vacation in Ireland!

Y'all know what day it is: Feature Friday! Meet our expert bug catcher Gerard:

How did you find SnapStream? 

I found SnapStream through Indeed.com. The job listing was very effective at portraying the company as a geek-friendly environment with a great culture. Working on a product that records television was an interesting choice. Many of my college friends ended up working on bill collecting software. 

What is your role here?

I’m a Developer-in-test, or a developer that works on the Quality Assurance team. I’m responsible for writing and maintaining various suites of automated tests, writing internal tools, and testing some of the more technical improvements that end up in our queue. It's my job to make the lives of the blackbox testers easier by catching bugs before they do, and coming up with improvements to our workflow to save time.

How have you grown with SnapStream?

I came to SnapStream knowing how to “code”. I’ve grown to understand more about what it means to develop and maintain a solution. I’ve been exposed to so many new challenges like learning how to build and maintain a cable plant or how to automate user interaction with a page streaming live video. My favorite memories working at SnapStream are those when I finally get to the bottom of a problem I’ve been banging my head against. 

What is your favorite thing about SnapStream?

The atmosphere and culture is my favorite thing about SnapStream. It's a friendly and relaxed atmosphere. Between that and working on interesting products, I’d say that we have it pretty good here. 

What do you like to do when you aren’t at SnapStream?

I’m a PC gamer. I love to build my own gaming PCs and sink 100 hours into open world RPGs. I’m also very interested in travel.