It's that special time of year again at SnapStream. No, I don't mean Christmas, Flag Day, or even Talk Like a Pirate Day. I mean, Apple Product Announcement Day.

The Tradition

Going on three years now, we've celebrated in a very specific way.

The week before, with all of the scuttlebutt flying around the office, everyone carefully considers their position on each rumor so they can make their predictions.

Before the meeting, we take orders for Jimmy John's sandwiches and then fire up the big ol' conference room projector.

As the presentation starts, we lock in our final guesses for what will transpire. The wagers are only for in-office bragging rights, but still, if you get it right, that's six months of glory, until the next event.

Of course Apple doesn't live stream the actual video, so instead we pull up the live blog from Engadget, Mac Rumors or Gdgt. Those in the know will also bring a laptop or two and try to hit F5 quicker than the main machine, thus beating everyone else to the punch by four or five seconds. As the presentation goes on, we do our best Steve Jobs impression of how we're going to "love it" and about how "revolutionary it is." Here's hoping that Tim Cook rocks it Barnum-and-Bailey style and gives us a good circus.

So what do we expect for today? Well, there's even money on iPhone5 alone vs. iPhone5 + 4s getting announced. Sprint support seems to be a given. Other than that... it's all up in the air, we'll have to wait and see what happens.

If this sounds like a supersized DorkFest(TM), you're right... but it's also quite fun... and just another reason why I love working at SnapStream.

At the 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart added two more Emmy® statuettes to its category-sweeping collection. The Daily Show has an incredible winning streak to celebrate, going nine years strong for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series and earning its seventh all-time award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Series. Kudos!

To date they've racked up 16 Emmys, and we can't help but feel warm fuzzies all over— knowing that the show's comedy writers use our TV search technology to make some of the funniest television around. They've produced a recipe for lasting success: artfully pruning TV clips, seasoning them with sharp wit and serving them straight up ridiculous, Stewart-style. And we just can't get enough.

No joke, we hoard episodes of The Daily Show around here, as much for lunch-break entertainment as for pure inspiration. Every time we watch, we're in awe of what they do, using our product in such a creative way. While SnapStream is incredibly easy-to-use for any average Joe, the writing process that takes place around the technical workflow cannot be taught in any of our user training sessions. These talented content creators bring TV search to life, mixing montages and clever jokes in ways you couldn't imagine.

Before going up on stage to accept each Emmy award on Sunday night, Jon Stewart notably bear-hugged Stephen Colbert both times. I couldn't help but smile. Little do most viewers know, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show not only share the same production company, but they also have a joint SnapStream Cluster. Stewart said, "We're acutely aware of how fortunate we are to win it once let alone many times."

Today is the day! At the 2011 International Broadcasting Convention, Europe's largest professional broadcast show, SnapStream will premiere its best-of-breed TV recording and search capabilities on the world's stage, Hall 6, Stand 6.A06. This is a highly anticipated moment by many, and I mean MANY. Every day, we receive messages from organizations all over the world, looking to enlist SnapStream to solve their TV monitoring problems (which include costly clipping services and traditional, subscription-based media monitoring services).

The international distinction, or technical hurdle, has long been the varying digital broadcast standards native to each country. For example: In the U.S. and Canada, it's ATSC. In Europe, it's DVB-T and PAL. We soon discovered it wasn't going to be a simple migration to transfer the complexity of SnapStream's architecture over to these foreign standards.

Luckily, our engineers are incredibly smart people! So it's in due course that our team is now on the ground in Amsterdam, showcasing the first prototype of our European TV monitoring technology. The new SnapStream adds support for PAL and early support for DVB-T. Subtitles and teletext searching will be incorporated into a subsequent release.

If you're at the Amsterdam RAI, Septemeber 9 - 13, you'll see up close how SnapStream enables organizations to record, log and search traditional TV (terrestrial, cable or satellite), all over the LAN.

Today, our powerful TV monitoring platform is used by hundreds of broadcasters, production studios, educators and governments across North America. Now, European organizations will soon be able to leverage SnapStream's robust capabilities:

- Record large amounts of TV, from 4 channels to 50 channels or... more!
- Archive an unlimited amount of TV shows with expandable storage
- Access TV over the LAN from any LAN connected PC with a web browser
- Perform real-time keyword searches of subtitles (where available)
- Easily create, download and e-mail TV clips
- Receive TV e-mail alerts of specific mentions
- Watch TV from any PC on the network
- Transcode TV files seamlessly and quickly to WMV and H.264 formats

If you're not going to be at the show, contact us to set up a Web demo and to glean additional information.

The American Journalism Review writes about one of my favorite SnapStream customers: "What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart"

Brooks Jackson, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania: "I am in awe of the ability of Stewart and however many people he has working for him to cull through the vast wasteland of cable TV and pick out the political actors at their most absurd..."

A few weeks ago, I started noticing billboards around town (here in Houston) for a SnapStream customer, the Kidd Kraddick morning talk radio show:

After exchanging a few emails with their operations director, I got this update from them:

Over the past 2 years, SnapStream has become an invaluable resource to Kidd Kraddick in the Morning. Every single day we use SnapStream in several ways. With this program we are able to locate content that is specifically targeted at our demographic and use this content to entertain and inform our audience. On the video version of Kidd Kraddick in the Morning, KiddTV, commercial breaks are not full of boring infomercials or the same 4 songs your radio station plays, it is loaded with pop culture content from Entertainment Tonight, ENews and the late night talk shows to name a few. Without SnapStream the entertainment value of KiddTV and Kidd Kraddick in the Morning would not be at the high level it is today.

-Nick Adams
Director of KiddTV

Long-time TV clipping and monitoring service, VMS (video monitoring service) announced on Friday that they've shutdown their service as they file for bankruptcy (chapter 7, evidently). While their website is no longer working, the note on their site yesterday (Sunday Aug 28, 2011) read as follows:

The VMS Board with the input of qualified professionals have elected to close VMS.

Unfortunately almost all VMS personnel have been terminated effective today.

The decision has been made after exhaustively evaluating many different options and with sadness for our loyal staff and customers.

At some point in the very near future a Trustee will be appointed to liquidate VMS. We anticipate the trustee will make future communications with customers.

VMS thanks all customers for their loyal support.

My perspective, as the CEO and founder of SnapStream (a company that makes TV recording and search software used by many of the media monitoring companies out there today): As a member of the International Association of Broadcast Monitors, IABM, I had met a lot of execs from VMS over the years-- but none that still worked there this past Friday. Based on conversations I had with former VMS folks this morning, Friday's conclusion started with a big round of layoffs over a year ago. And since then, VMS had been trying to both cut costs and become profitable and they had been simultaneously trying to sell the company. VMS was one of the oldest companies in the TV monitoring and clipping business and as such, their cost structure was a lot higher than some of the companies that entered the market after them like Critical Mention and TV Eyes. I don't think VMS ever adapted to this new market reality-- for example, they still had 200 people in Kentucky that were manually reviewing lots of daily TV recordings and creating improved transcripts for them. Meanwhile, I think the market had moved on to "good enough" and cheaper services. Also, there were new options for recording and searching television (ie our product, SnapStream) that also ate into their customer base.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that SnapStream provides an alternative for folks who want to put their finger on the pulse of television... so if your organization gets mentioned on television a lot, SnapStream might be the right fit for you. Contact us if you think we might be a fit.

More information on VMS's shutdown here on the O'Dwyer's blog. I'll continue to post updates as I hear about them.

Also, here's a search on twitter for mentions of "VMS" (warning, a lot of "false positives" in the search results... While it probably wasn't their biggest problem, VMS also had a search engine optimization (SEO) problem that went straight back to their name. 'VMS' or even 'video monitoring service' is about as non-unique of a name as they come!)

First of all, who knew the East Coast of the U.S. was prone to seismic activity? The last earthquake on record for the region was 1897!

When breaking news unfolds in a flash, SnapStream comes in extremely handy to rack up mentions about a particular topic. Boom, boom, boom. Today's rattling event is a prime example of our powerful TV search technology at work. In a matter of seconds, I pulled up 100+ hits and climbing for the keyword "earthquake," based on the local and national news channels recording at our office in Houston. (What you can record, is what you can search.)

How is your organization monitoring the East Coast quake? See examples of my TV search findings (click images to enlarge).

P.S. To all of our customers and partners in the DC and NE area, we hope you're doing OK!

You just watched that video, right? That was our very own Sam Houston, the Academy-award-winning actor we hired to document our field trip. Just kidding, Sam's actually our multi-talented inside salesman. (No joke, this boy can sing! Check out his vocals here.)

Now on to the outing! Not far from the metropolis of Houston lies a well-manicured city called Sugar Land, named righteously so for its rich history steeped in sugar cane. We recently visited Sugar Land's City Hall (only a 30-minute drive from our office) to get a real insider's view of the city government complex and of course, their extra sweet SnapStream setup!

We met with Brent Neeley, municipal television producer at the City of Sugar Land, who gave us a full tour through the facility, top to bottom. He has a cool job which involves capturing and broadcasting the city council meetings and proceedings onto the City of Sugar Land's local channel. Plus, Brent manages the entire TV monitoring operation for the city.

Brent keeps the SnapStream appliance powered up and protected in the temperature-controlled and key-padded server room (very secure). But, he accesses all of his TV recordings from his desktop PC upstairs over the LAN connection. Sugar Land has six analog tuners dedicated to recording the four major networks, the city's local network and a wildcard for ad hoc news needs.

Now, I won't sugarcoat it for you, this is what Sugar Land was working with before they switched to SnapStream in 2009.

While TiVo works great as a DVR for at-home use, it's just not brawny enough to accomplish the robust TV monitoring tasks of city-level operation. That's simply not what TiVo was created to do. Therefore, SnapStream has proven to be a valuable investment, saving the City time and money, as a product of increased efficiency in everyday workflows plus the increased reliability and confidence in the hardware platform itself.

What a simple TV search for "Twitter" can do to inspire a LOL three-minute segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Lots of talk show hosts can talk the talk (naturally), but Jon Stewart and his team really bring the goods—pumping in all kinds of TV news clips to irrefutably make a sharp-tongued point. Gotta love it! And for the record, @SnapStream is now following @LadyBigMac. Slightly confused? Just watch.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-july-27-2011/twitter-pundits