First and foremost, let me start by saying, “Welcome to the family “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver, and the entire team of producers, editors, and show writers!”

In case you haven’t heard, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” selected SnapStream’s TV recording and search technology to help build the TV clips and content that will be used on the show. (Here is the press release)

Need an example? Next time you tune in (the show airs every Sunday on HBO) watch for the pop-up TV clips that John Oliver references throughout the show. Those clips are pulled using SnapStream!

How They Use SnapStream

With SnapStream’s technology, the team at “Last Week Tonight” is able to quickly search and aggregate mass amounts of current, often obscure, TV content from worldwide sources. This technology, along with John Oliver’s undeniable genius for political satire, is the perfect equation for comedic gold.

Team SnapStream had a great time at the NAB Show (National Association of Broadcasters). Who doesn't love spending a week in Las Vegas? We visited with a ton of interesting broadcast folks at our booth and knocked their socks off with our TV search technology.

On April 8, 2014, Microsoft will be turning off support for Windows XP. If you currently have SnapStream hardware that runs on Windows XP, you are probably wondering what this change will mean for you. So, we'd like to take a moment to answer some of the questions you may have. If we haven't addressed your specific concern, you can always contact SnapStream's Technical Support Team, who's happy to help!

Can I Continue to Use SnapStream?

Yes, you may continue to make use of your SnapStream indefinitely. However, please be aware that Microsoft will no longer provide updates to Windows XP, including updates for critical security issues. If you continue to use SnapStream after Windows XP support ends in April, it will still work, but it may become more vulnerable to security risks. The Washington Post recently published an article about the vulnerability of government computers to hackers in the afterlife of Windows XP.

Will I Continue Receiving SnapStream Support?

As long as you have a valid SnapStream support agreement, our team will continue to provide you with first-class service (phone and email support, troubleshooting and warranty).

New SnapStream 6.2 has arrived to streamline your everyday workflows that revolve around clipping, sharing and managing TV content. These are the bread-and-butter tasks that most users do pretty frequently.

In the improvements below, you'll see how we shaved off intermediary steps and linked things together, resulting in seamless workflows from start to finish. We designed these changes to help save you time and make monitoring TV more efficient and carefree in general. We hope that brings a smile to your face, because that's our goal.

PEG Channels in the United States

In your city or town, you have likely flipped to a public, educational and governmental (PEG) channel that broadcasts community events, town hall meetings, public service announcements and other local original programming. Did you know there are over 5,000 PEG channels operating nationwide?

Every U.S. city has the right to collect a cable television franchise fee from the cable TV companies that serve its community. Thanks to the Cable Communications Act of 1984 (Section 622). These franchise fees, which are based on a percentage of cable operators' gross revenues, can generate huge sums of PEG funding for municipalities, for instance as much as $142 million for Dallas in 2007 and $140 million for New York in the fiscal year of 2010.

The catch-22? PEG funds are designated only for capital expenditures that finance day-to-day operations of public-access channels. But within those regulations, PEG funds can be used for various types of purchases. A good rule of thumb to go by is whether the capital being purchased has a substantial shelf life beyond the fiscal year.

SnapStream today announced the 6.1 release of its TV Monitoring and Search technology. The release features groundbreaking language intelligence delivering the most relevant TV search results, new TV playlists for sequenced playback of multiple pieces of content, expanded cloud sharing functionality, and enhancements to the Recording Manager for easier management of recording priorities. SnapStream also launched the new SnapStream ASI product line, which enables broadcasters to ingest and record the ASI format (Asynchronous Serial Interface).

Thanks to new advances in language intelligence in 6.1, SnapStream's TV search results are enriched for the better, bringing you a wider variety of useful findings and relevant information every time you search.

Our TV search engine has always delivered exact matches with bull's-eye accuracy and now, we have expanded the target zone to include closely related, broad matches that are equally as meaningful but not so glaringly obvious.

Hi, everyone! My name is Mike Speriosu and I was the main developer of a set of TV search improvements in SnapStream 6.1 that involve language. I recently finished my doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin where I worked on problems at the intersection of human language and computer science, and was lucky enough to join the SnapStream development team a few months ago.

Products like SnapStream are part of an ongoing trend in technology to help people interact with each other and with computers using their most advanced and expressive mode of communication: language. After working on a variety of linguistic and software problems in academia, I was very eager to apply my skills to a real-life product that could benefit from more linguistic intelligence.

One of the most compelling features of SnapStream's TV media monitoring technology has always been its ability to search recordings and send alerts based on what’s said on TV, and now recording and searching closed caption data work better than ever.

Next week, we're heading to the Big Apple to showcase our TV monitoring technology at Content and Communications World (CCW). Many broadcast folks refer to this hallmark event as the NAB of the East Coast. Since NAB in April, SnapStream's engineers have been diligently working to launch SnapStream 6.0 and tons of new capabilities.

Whether you're a current user or considering SnapStream for the first time, you'll find that everything in the new version helps to enrich your production workflow for recording, searching, clipping and repurposing TV content.

SnapStream is proud to announce that we’ve partnered with Australian digital media specialists Digistor to help introduce our TV search solution to Australia. We feel working together with Digistor is a big step forward in our company’s expansion.