We want toys!

Tech toys, that is. We, at SnapStream, have an obsession with shiny new gadgetry. And during the holiday season, our tech-lust gets extreme. Here's what's topping our collective wish list for this year.

1. Like in the movie Minority Report, Daniel F. wants to use hand gestures to control his computer, using the Leap Motion controller.

2. As a fan of Frank Gehry, Rakesh admires this photograph because it shows the famous architect putting his own creation through its paces. Who knew that Gehry designed and built desks earlier in his career?

3. Chris is fired up about getting an Induction Burner, so he can cook like an Iron Chef.

4. Wishing she could fly, Adrienne wants to soar above water with the Flyboard. (Check out the demonstration video!)

5. Nestor wants to run freely with these wireless earbuds.

6. Zack is all about the Book Book, which consolidates your iPhone and wallet, with a vintage touch.

7. Rob likes the Wasp Injector Knife, which can be used for diving, hunting or just attacking a watermelon.

8. Michael B. wants the blazing Asus gaming ultrabook, so he can play all the latest video games.

9. All Daniel M. wanted this year was a wireless mouse and keyboard... and he got it!

10. Because Gayan enjoys photography in his spare time, he's eyeing this really nice Canon camera.

11. If money were no object, Joel would splurge and get a monkey in a fitted winter coat. (Not sold in stores.)

12. Aaron fantasizes about commuting to work at SnapStream in the 2013 SRT Viper.

13. Nestor wants to give his iPhone the best protection with a gorilla glass case.

14. There's something about putting a pen to paper... or to a screen! Michael C. would kill for Wacom's interactive pen display.

15. Rachel wants to kick up her feet and let the Roomba take care of cleaning her apartment.

16. What Rene wants is legen—wait for it—dary! The official How I Met Your Mother suitjamas, in smooth grey silk. Totally work appropriate.

17. Josie's phone battery is always running low, so she wants some kind of external charger to make it last.

18. Rakesh also wants this magical unicorn mask, for unclear reasons. (He wants to make us laugh?)

What are you wishing for? From all of us at SnapStream, we wish you a happy, healthy holiday season and new year!

Because TV is our world, we are very excited to exhibit at Content and Communications World, November 14 - 15, at booth #856.

SnapStream enables TV show creatives to easily search TV and incorporate TV clips into their programs. Shows like The Soup, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report all tap into SnapStream's endless supply of up-to-the-minute pop culture and news clips.

This is the time we live in: the "clip culture."

Video clips are suddenly everywhere. They have jumped from the Internet and splattered all over TV. Talk shows, entertainment/comedy shows and even hard-hitting news programs have all added TV clips into the mix of writing and production.

How do they do it?

SnapStream provides broadcasters with the TV recording and search technology to reliably capture and re-purpose TV content.

You have The View re-broadcasting and commenting about what was said on Fox News; CNN reporting on a skit from Saturday Night Live; and E! News recapping Jersey Shore and all the latest episodes of reality TV.

Because of how easy it is to create a TV clip and play out to SDI, all of these shows have embraced the clip culture. And we have to admit, we think it's pretty cool how the landscape of TV is changing before our eyes.

With fair use, The Daily Show (and all shows) can embed and comment on any content, from any network. So now, TV is this amazingly interconnected ecosystem. Does it remind of you something? (The Web!)

In short, we love supporting and cultivating this fresh new format of TV, so please join us at CCW in New York City next week:

Make an appointment with SnapStream >>

We will demonstrate the core features for TV and film production:

• Recording and searching unlimited TV
• Creating and sharing unlimited TV clips
• Live transcoding to H.264 or WMV
• Play out to SDI (into editing suites)
• Long-term, searchable TV archives

Remember the days when your teacher would roll in a TV cart from the school library?

You knew what that meant. TV in the classroom = awesome. The day's lesson was about to come alive through video.

When we spotted this picture on George Takei's Facebook page the other day, it made us smile, because it represents a significant trend in education. And we put our own little spin on it.

Video, while not a new medium, continues to excite students in new ways. It's the fact that rich video is available anywhere and everywhere, from YouTube to mobile devices. It's because TV is always fresh, relevant and relatable. Once you have the classroom engaged, the real learning truly begins. We know video is a powerful and dynamic teaching tool, because more and more schools are streaming TV to the classroom with SnapStream's technology.

One SnapStream sits in your school's media center (not actually wheeled around). Teachers then log in from their computers and play recordings (or clips) on their projectors or TVs. See how engaged and connected your class will be when you show them the Curiosity rover landing on Mars or the latest presidential debate.

Just lose the cart and DVD player/VCR. It's not very 2012.

Before I began researching the news comedy programs outside the U.S., I had no idea what the world had in store. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has inspired so many TV shows and spin-offs worldwide, that the initial query of "who are they?" evolved into a four-part series. (See posts 1, 2 and 3.) Right on key, the Foreign Policy in Focus recently wrote about the Global Stewarts, too.

We have learned that comedy and politics are tightly integrated, not just at home, but abroad. It's been good to pop out of our own "cable TV bubble" and to see how the international crowd entertains, from living rooms in South America to Israel. In today's final batch of shows, you'll see that every nation's comedic style reflects the social and political culture of the population. Comedy is how people make sense of, poke holes in, and cope with the critical, and oftentimes trivial, events gripping their daily lives.

See related posts:

• The Worldview of News Satire TV Shows, like The Daily Show
• The Daily Show equivalents in South America and Italy
• Medley of Fake News “Daily Shows” in Canada, the UK and Australia

Because laughter is the best medicine, here's your next dosage of satirical TV programs. Today's Rx of "newstainment" shows includes the most hilarious pundits of Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. British comedy standards run especially high, because they're the ones responsible for television's satire boom in the '60s (as explained in my first post earlier this week.) Writer's warning: Side effects may include side-splitting abdominal pains, acute cackling, involuntary snorting and severe shortness of breath.

Stay tuned, next we're traveling to exotic locales in Europe, Asia and the Middle East to round out our exploration of news satire shows around the world.

See related posts:

• The Worldview of News Satire TV Shows, like The Daily Show
• The Daily Show equivalents in South America and Italy
• News Parody Lights Up TV in Europe, the Middle East and Asia

Following up on yesterday's post: We're exploring international TV shows equivalent to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, in terms of their cultural significance and satirical style. To kick off our trip around the world, let's take a look at the funniest fake news TV shows of South America and Italy, where everyone loves Tarantino movies and double entendres. As awesome as descriptions are, it's even more telling to watch the clips!

Come back to SnapStream's blog to learn about the comedy news TV shows of Canada and the United Kingdom.

See related posts:

• The Worldview of News Satire TV Shows, like The Daily Show
• Medley of Fake News “Daily Shows” in Canada, the UK and Australia
• News Parody Lights Up TV in Europe, the Middle East and Asia

If you've heard of SnapStream's TV monitoring technology, you've likely heard The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report mentioned in the same breath. While we can't take credit for Jon Stewart's acerbic on-air personality or Stephen Colbert's deadpan delivery, we can say one thing: we are the television search technology behind the news-driven humor.

Yup, our very own closed-captioning search technology is at work on the TV production sets of both of these Emmy-award-winning shows. For this reason, we at SnapStream have a special place in our hearts for the TV genre of news satire, or "fake news." So, this got us thinking, when did this trend come into vogue? Are there mock newscast shows in other countries? Who are The Daily Show equivalents worldwide? It turns out, The Daily Show's international impact is pretty astounding.

First let's flash back: The 1960s marked the era of Britain's satire boom in broadcast, with the groundbreaking That Was the Week That Was on BBC. In 1975, Saturday Night Live took off in the U.S. with its mock newscast "Weekend Update," which continues today as the show's longest-running recurring sketch. Then came HBO's Not Necessarily the News (1983-1990). Fast-forward to 1999, when The Daily Show with Jon Stewart first entered America's living rooms.

The Daily Show took a trailblazing comedic direction, focusing on politics, current events and the hypocrisy underlying it all. The show's editorial voice has become deeply influential to our society, confirmed in a phenomenon called "The Daily Show Effect," according to American Politics Research. Look at the books written about the topic, too! (See: News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe)

In 2002, CNN International began airing The Daily Show: Global Edition to overseas audiences, spawning syndication and fan bases in dozens of other countries. There's one official franchise in the Netherlands, The Daily Show (Nederlandse Editie). As a result, broadcasters all over the world have created their own localized spin-offs of The Daily Show, embracing the "infotainment" format and stylings of Jon Stewart.

Here's a clip of Jon Stewart appearing on the The Daily Show: Netherlands Edition, hosted by Jan Jaap van der Wal.

Up next, we will get to know the TV shows outside the U.S. similar to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report:

• Caiga Quien Caiga
• Custe o Que Custar
• Le Iene
• Striscia la notizia
• Heute-Show
• Al-Bernameg
• Parazit
• This Hour Has 22 Minutes
• Rick Mercer Report
• Week Thus Far
• Have I Got News For You
• Eretz Nehederet
• If I Were Prime Minister
• Russell Howard's Good News
• 10 O'Clock Live
• Good News Week

Stay tuned!

See related posts:

• The Daily Show equivalents in South America and Italy
• Medley of Fake News “Daily Shows” in Canada, the UK and Australia
• News Parody Lights Up TV in Europe, the Middle East and Asia

SnapStream 5.5 introduces lots of exciting, new features to the TV Search platform:

• Workflows help automate the transcodes and bulk moves you do routinely
• ShowSqueeze Live lets you transcode in-progress TV recordings
• SmartChapters automatically detect and segment commercials

But we didn't stop there. We made some notable improvements, too:

• In addition to Firefox, Mac Web Player now supports Chrome and Safari
• Clip start and end points are now draggable
• Encrypted communication between SnapStream and all clients for improved security

Now, let's go more in-depth so you fully understand the powerful possibilities behind each of these new features.

Workflows

Think of Workflows as paths laid out for your TV recordings. At the end of the day, what formats do you need your files in? And where should they get saved? Workflows help you answer these questions and set these processes in motion. Then, SnapStream manages the rest.

To kick off the action, you'll select a Trigger. SnapStream 5.5 brings you two new Triggers, Recording Started and Clip Created. So, for example, once a clip is created, you can have it automatically "ShowSqueeze to H.264" or "save a copy to John's News folder." These are called Actions.

But wait, you don't want all of your recordings treated exactly the same, do you? Workflows help you move away from cookie-cutter, global settings. That's why we created Filters, to help you select the criteria for how specific types of recordings should undergo processing. In 5.5, we're giving you three new filters, just 'cause we like you so much: From Series, From Category and In Folder. So now you can get really granular and choosy with it.

ShowSqueeze Live

ShowSqueeze Live is a brand new feature born out of Workflows. Up til now, you could only ShowSqueeze a TV recording once it finished airing. But now, you can take control right when it starts! Yes, right when a broadcast hits the air, you can send SnapStream to work and all of that lovely ShowSqueezing will happen in real time, while the recording is in progress, in sync with the program.

The beauty of this is, naturally, that it saves you not only the extra steps but the extra time involved. No more waiting. When you have a production deadline to meet, you'll appreciate this huge time-saver and wonder how you got along without it.

SmartChapters

SmartChapters are another newbie to SnapStream, making the product a really well-rounded fit for ad verification. SmartChapters automatically detect commercials by marking major scene changes in the broadcast. You'll see the SmartChapters appear as grey segments on the Web Player timeline. Using your arrow keys, you can skip between the commercials and the program to easily navigate any TV recording, really great for ad tracking.

On top of that, SmartChapters add a smart layer to TV Search, allowing you to filter your results to include or exclude commercials. Like in the example above, we searched for instances of Swiffer only within ads, bringing us right to the money spot.

Upgrade to 5

There's truly never been a better time to get started with SnapStream, or to claim what is rightfully yours: a free upgrade to version 5!

Will you be at NAB April 16-19? 'Cause we will! We're very excited to show you all that's new with SnapStream's TV search technology. In the last year, we rolled out six new releases, featuring these heavyweights:

- New! Web Player for Mac and PC

- New! Task Rules

In South Upper Hall SU9115, SnapStream's new Mac and PC Web Players will go head-to-head in a series of hands-on demonstrations. Don't miss this epic NAB showdown. You'll definitely want a front-row seat, so...

Record TV Think of SnapStream as a DVR on steroids. Record as few as four or as many as 100 TV channels at the same time while rubbing your belly, patting the top of your head and standing on one foot.	Endless Archival With SnapStream's clustering technology, you can archive TV for months and years on end. Channels and storage are limitless, so you can monitor more and more TV over time.	Transcode TV Leave it to ShowSqueeze to pump out those beefy post-processing tasks. Transcode TV to H.264 or WMV, with plenty of knobs to gear up individualized, custom workflows.
Make TV Clips SnapStream lets you make TV clips and share them with the world. No fancy editing skills required. Drag your start and end points—then presto—a clip is born!	Play out SDI In real time, play out recorded TV content to your favorite editing suites with our HD-SDI Playout Node, which connects to your SnapStream SD or HD.	TV Alerts Follow TV in near real time with TV Alerts. We'll send you an email with TV search results, linking to where and when your favorite keywords appeared on TV.