Super Bowl commercials air pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while (in between gnawing on buffalo wings and guzzling beer), you could miss the best ones! Based on our selection of favorites from Super Bowl XLVI, we can conclude that SnapStream is made up of dog lovers and Betty White enthusiasts. Who knew?

An estimated 111.3 million people watched this year's Super Bowl, making it the most watched television show in U.S. History. In case you missed it, we created a 15-second recap of all the greatest ads to catch you up to speed. (Click below.)

Whew, that was a rush of subliminal messaging! We put that together using our very own TV recording and search technology. Now, for the unabridged versions. Please enjoy SnapStream’s handpicked favorites of Super Bowl XLVI, on the house!

1. Doritos: "Man’s Best Friend"
Did you know that Doritos commercials are all user-generated? It's pretty cool, because both of their ads landed in our top picks. In this one, Doritos are centered as the dog’s mischievous bribe to his owner, in regards to the whereabouts of their missing cat. Sorry, Fluffy.
TV search term: “Cat”

2. Honda: “Matthew’s Day Off”
Matthew Broderick easily falls back into the character of Ferris Bueller, the role of a charming, clever high-school slacker which made him famous at the age of 23. In this spinoff, Broderick plays hooky in a red Honda CR-V instead of the red 1961 Ferrari GT California featured in the original film.
TV search term: “Broderick”

3. Bud Light: “Rescue Dog”
This is Pavlovian conditioning at its finest! A "rescue dog" named Weego is expertly trained to fetch Bud Light bottles whenever somebody says, “here we go.” Get it? "Here, Weego!" Clearly, Weego is prepared to handle the most urgent of emergencies, like needing a beer in your hand stat.
TV search terms: “Here we go”

4. Skechers: “Go Run”
Apparently we swoon over anything that includes a cute dog, and an underdog, at that. We also thought the CGI moonwalking was competitive to Michael Jackon's. Do you think Mr. Quiggly is an adequate replacement for the former Skechers spokesperson, Kim Kardashian?
TV search term: “Skechers”

5. The Voice: “Vocal Combat”
Dear Betty White, it is about time someone loved you for more than your body! She's America’s original and most wanted cougar, but with a mix of, "Awww, will you be my grandma?" Hey Betty, SnapStream would love to have you around, knitting sweaters and baking cookies every day.
TV search terms: “The Voice”

6. Volkswagen: “Dog Strikes Back”
At SnapStream, we're participating in a fitness challenge, so we admire this dog’s aspiration to get in shape. Plus, anything with Star Wars wins us over. Did you think the dog was funnier than the Vader kid?
TV search terms: “Get up offa that thing”

7. Doritos: “Slingshot Baby”
Another piece of consumer-generated gold for Doritos. Our favorite part is when the baby propels forward in slow-mo. Everything else in the world freezes in that moment of airborne bliss. There’s just nothing like snacking on nacho cheese Doritos with grandma on a sunny day.
TV search terms: “Doritos”

8. Oikos Yogurt: “The Tease”
We were all a big fan of John Stamos on Glee last season, so we were excited to see him make another televised appearance during the Super Bowl. Stamos proudly represents his Greek heritage in the name of protein-packed yogurt. Ladies, would you share your Oikos with John Stamos?
TV search terms: “Oikos”

9. Acura: “Transactions”
We have some serious car buffs in our office, but nothing like Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno. These two comedians are well-known for their automobile enthusiasm and collections. We totally want Leno's flying squirrel suit to make our daily commutes more like super hero missions.
TV search terms: “Acura”

10. Chevrolet: “Stunt Anthem”
The stunts featured in this spot were totally extreme and off the wall, just like us. Bravo to Chevy for an excellent musical choice to fuel this epic series of stunts. We could also wax nostalgic about the car’s name, Sonic.
TV search terms: “Chevy Sonic”

And that concludes our Top 10 Favorite Super Bowl Commercials of 2012. What were your favorites this year, and why?

SnapStream's newly released Mac Web Player opens up the world of TV search to Mac users for the very first time. As we hoped it would, the announcement of Mac support generated tons of excitement and fanfare on Engadget, GigaOm and a bunch of other places.

Today, it gets even better. We are releasing 5.4.2, which carries support for HD video playback on Mac OS X. Woohoo!

So now you can enjoy the crisp resolution of high-definition television as you search, play and clip content from your Mac, connected to your SnapStream HD. Version 5.4.2 also features increased stability for the Mac Web Player and the ability to load guide data from offline sources, if you're so inclined.

While HDTV monitoring is a nice luxury for some, for others it is absolutely necessary. For instance, when repurposing TV content, it's HD for the win. For SnapStream users who work heavily in Final Cut Pro, in Mac environments, this one's for you. Seamless Mac HD support is bringing you a big workflow boost!

Hey Windows users, we haven't forgotten about you! In addition to the new features we highlighted here, every SnapStream release rolls out fixes and improvements meant to refine your user experience. So, it's usually a good idea to update to the latest version of SnapStream. Check out our release notes for the specifics.

SnapStream users, contact our support team to see about scheduling your free upgrade to version 5.4.2.

Not searching TV, yet? Give our sales engineers a holler to get started today.

In the spirit of the season, we are delighted to share a special video treat with you. SnapStream's little helpers ransacked their archive of goodies to produce a year in review through the eyes of TV search. Please pour yourself a glass of eggnog and sing along as we wish you a merry holiday season and a happy new year!

Keep on searching in 2012,

Team SnapStream

With bounties of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie on our minds this week, it's easy to lose sight of what Thanksgiving is really all about. Giving thanks.

At SnapStream, we thank our lucky stars we're in Texas. We will never forget our HTPC roots and humble beginnings as we continue to grow the enterprise-class TV monitoring solution that we provide today. To all of our power users and loyal advocates (that means you, reading this blog!), we greatly appreciate your support.

On our Yammer network (which is thankfully free and awesome), I posted a question to Team SnapStream, "What are you most thankful for this year?" I'll let the responses speak for themselves. Small disclaimer: Employee avatars have not been altered from their original form.

Aaron Thompson, President
"I'm thankful for the love of my family and to be leading a successful company of awesome people during sketchy economic times."

Rakesh Agrawal, Founder and CEO
"I'm thankful for my two daughters, my wife and the rest of my family. And I'm thankful for my SnapStream co-workers who I enjoy working with... whether or not I'm in the office."

Rob Alexander, Software Engineer
"I am thankful for Star Wars Beta and Diablo Beta."

Zack Price, Manager of Quality Assurance
"I am thankful for working with a good group of friends. I'm also thankful for pictures of cats dressed up in little costumes."

Adrienne Gonzalez, Platform Engineer and Technical Support Rep
"I am thankful for having a wonderful family, awesome co-workers and finally getting some more rain."

Chris Wilkerson, IT Manager
"I am thankful for my newly rebuilt family, SSDs making computers faster and for the reboot of IT here at SnapStream."

Daniel Mee, Technical Support Rep
"The LogMeIn Rescue desktop application."

Jason Baumeister, Director of Development
"I'm thankful for Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers."

Josie Munoz, Accountant
"I am thankful for having such a big family. Their love and support has helped keep me strong, especially this year."

Michael Bui, Technical Support Rep
"Family, work, friends, etc."

Gerard Monier, Developer in Test
"I'm thankful for intellisense."

Joel Gabiola, Marketing Director
"I'm thankful for long weekends."

Elbert Pruitt Jr., Software Test Engineer
"I'm thankful for the good health of my fam."

Allen Moody, Technical Account Manager
"I am most thankful for my new job at SnapStream. I'm proud to be part of such an amazingly talented team."

Rachel Eichenbaum, Marketing Campaigns Manager
"I give thanks to Sprint for finally getting the iPhone and to the late Wilson Greatbatch who invented the cardiac pacemaker. "

Dear reader, what are you thankful for? Feel free to share in the comments.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

At some point in your computer-based life, you have probably experienced the wretched agony of software that doesn’t do what you think it should. You’ve probably clicked on a cryptic button, waited entirely too long for a task to complete, or accidentally activated the nuclear option that consigns all of your progress to digital oblivion. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These experiences are so ubiquitous that they have been given an official title, “Computer Rage." (Yes, it's in Wikipedia.)

You know it when you feel it. Your heart pounds and your face flushes. You grip your mouse tightly and communicate this displeasure to your machine verbally, regardless of whether or not it has voice recognition software.

Select Google image search results for "Computer Rage"

The much needed relief from your computer woes comes in the form of quality assurance, where we work to ensure that the software does exactly what it’s supposed to do. Within SnapStream, recording TV shows, creating clips, ShowSqueezing episodes, e-mailing TV alerts, and indexing media items are all tasks that have a very clear purpose and pattern of behavior.

They possess multi-faceted progressions of functionality and several layers of complexity which require intricate and multi-leveled testing to guarantee their performance. To safeguard you from Computer Rage, we dream up ways to turn that complexity on its head. We break the software so that you don’t have to.

To test the software from the inside, we attempt to walk a mile in your shoes, one inch at a time. We do this by asking specific “what if” questions:

“What if I attempt to delete a media item while it’s recording?”
“What if my drive fills up with recordings?”
“What if I schedule more recordings than I have tuners for?”

SnapStream has the answers to these questions because a tester has asked them. We then build the answer into the software by deciding what the reasonable expectation of the feature should be. Essentially, this consists of another round of questions. Shall we let the user swim at his own risk or be the heroic lifeguard who ensures the safety and stability of the system? Will the user expect this feature to operate in this manner, or will they wince in agony?

Eventually, we arrive at answers for these questions, and the answers become test cases. We decide that, in a certain case, the software should behave a certain way. As we accumulate test cases, the testing coverage of our software grows and the ability to test the larger picture opens up to us. Design paradigms become more pronounced. We test to ensure that new features behave in ways that are similar to the “personality” that users have come to expect from the software.

Ultimately, it’s this “personality” that makes for a great user experience. When you feel like you know what to expect from software, you feel more comfortable using it. Computer Rage be gone.

SnapStream isn't lacking for strange traditions, and this one certainly doesn't break that mold.

In the tradition of singing the blues in Adventures in Babysitting, no one leaves SnapStream without a Dance Central Dance Battle.

Watch the extended clip here, to catch my reference.

And who do we have here, but none other than the man, the legend, the one who takes it to the (PB)MAX, Percy Bell!

For those not in the know, Mr. Max was my office mate, testing cohort and friend of many years who worked at SnapStream until he followed love a few states away three years ago.

Happily, he remembered the good old times and paid us a visit on a recent trip to Houston.

By wearing his SnapStream t-shirt Superman style, he was still able to access the SnapStream lair. We took a tour of the office, highlighting some new additions from the office build-out to the additional racks in the test lab, and then met the some of the new SnapStreamers.

We even took a picture of the two of us in mock fisticuffs.... giving proper homage to all of the late night heated discussions we had about how feature X should work in the software.

Then it was time to say farewell, but as I said, ain't nobody gets out of this place without a dance-off!

One of the least recognized, yet most powerful features of SnapStream is the ability for our customers to create custom workflows by leveraging the software’s built-in API. The Application Programming Interface acts as a connector between different software programs, allowing them to interact with one another in a seamless fashion.

With SnapStream's API, the question of "can your software do this?" is now completely open-ended. Developers can create third-party applications that tightly integrate with SnapStream's TV search technology to accomplish almost anything imaginable. In layman’s terms, SnapStream’s API lets developers do cool things like:

• Create custom search portals
• Automatically create multiple versions of varying bitrate WMV or H.264 files (using our ShowSqueeze technology)
• Integrate with a Google Calendar to automatically schedule recordings on a closed-circuit camera

Densan Consultants, one of SnapStream’s custom code partners, has harnessed SnapStream’s API to create a customer-facing Web portal called NewsLink that allows the end user to search amongst TV transcripts (from two SnapStreams), a collection of 50+ federal government news publications, and newswires—all from a single, unified interface. Did I mention that the two SnapStream systems are located in two completely different regions of Canada?

View SnapStream in Canada in a larger map

With NewsLink, two SnapStreams are integrated along with EMM print sources and newswires.

The benefit with this approach is that this customer no longer has three independent tools by which they gather transcripts, news publications and newswire stories. Instead, the end-user simply launches his web browser, types in a search term, and voila, instant search results about what’s happening on CBC and Reuters.

TV Search + Print Search + Internet Search + Wire Search

Custom Web portal, searching SnapStream, EMM Print Sources and Newswires.

Perhaps the best part of the API: It's free to customers! To interface with the API, all you’ll need is a developer who's familiar with JSON Web Services, along with some ideas to implement. If you’d like to learn more about SnapStream’s API, and even look at sample code, just visit http://code.snapstream.com! You can consult with our engineering team as well by contacting us at sales@snapstream.com.

As frequent readers of our blog know, we've written several posts about how to build your own digital cable headend (aka a QAM headend). And we've reviewed most of the products in the market, including our favorite the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM.

But I just recently learned about some new products in this area from Drake and they appear to have GREAT price points:

• Drake's HDE24 High Definition MPEG Encoder Module product (which also requires the Drake MEQ-1000): Again, each module handles one channel and with 2 modules per encoder host, the cost per channel works out to something like $1900 / channel. These modules DO have closed captioning support.

• Drake's DSE24 High Definition Signage Encoder product: One box handles one channel and appears to cost about $1,200 per channel (compare this to the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM which will run you about $3,000 / channel). Problem is that these units do NOT support closed captioning right now.

The only problem is we haven't tested either of these units yet in-house so we can't comment on video quality, stability, or other features. We're working on getting eval units in-house and once we do, we'll post more detailed reviews. Meanwhile, at least the HDE24/EH24 products appear to be VERY strong with all the necessary features and about 50% less than the Blonder Tongue product.

Walking into my office here at SnapStream, I felt a different energy in the air. As I sat down at my desk, I watched my cube-mate watch an old interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from 2007. Around the corner, I can faintly hear our IT guy have a conversation with our head tester about what had transpired the night before: Steve Jobs died.

Last night, I was at a party and someone mentioned that Steve Jobs just passed away. I instantly pulled up the Apple Web site, ironically on an iPhone that Steve invented, and unfortunately found the rumors true. The confirmation of his passing affected me in a subtle but profound way. I come from a design background and always admired the artistry and detail that Apple brought to the tech space. Steve saved us from the beige and lifeless personal computing concepts and literally molded our technology future.

If media is a litmus test of cultural significance, today is a prime example. Witnessing the Tweets, YouTube tributes and searches on TV (what we do), there is an unlimited sense of gratitude for what Steve Jobs meant to millions around the world. When I started here eight years ago, I was pretty much the only Apple fanboy in the office. Now, it’s sort of a company ritual to watch the live feed of every Apple announcement.

Steve Jobs delivered nothing less than magic, a type of magic that transformed our culture, inspired discovery and amazed the kid at heart inside us all. Proving the impossible to be possible—that was the standard in his eyes and I can’t imagine the mediocrity we’d be living in if that wasn’t the case. I am very appreciative to experience the world that Jobs helped to mold. Maybe Steve’s inspiring messages, like his commencement speech to Stanford in 2005, will ensure that his inspiration will live on with us.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.