The popular New York Times Blog, Media Decoder, pointed out a noteworthy trend this week. You may have speculated on this, owing to Apple's flashy press events and drawn out product releases, but a recently-published study from Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism confirms it. (Hey, they use SnapStream to analyze TV, high fives!)
Rounding up a week in the news with our data collected at TV Trends, here's a cool word cloud that visually displays the nation's pulse. The words are proportionally sized to higher frequency of mention in the closed captioning data, showing the hottest and most prominent issues saturating the headlines. You see, Iraq, Brigade, Combat... Serious stuff.
We took it to our TV Trends analytics to investigate the uptick of buzz surrounding the iPad, which hits the market tomorrow. The forecast calls for an explosive spike in the media frenzy as users get their hands on experimenting with the highly anticipated Apple tablet. This Wednesday's episode of Modern Family indicates that it's going to be a full-on mob scene. Brilliant stroke of product placement, I might add.
Global DVD sales are projected to decline by 12% this year, compared to 9% in 2009, according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics in Home Media Magazine. Even with Blu-ray expected to rake in $6.5 billion in worldwide sales, it won’t be enough to sustain or regain the industry’s momentum.
As my team is in the field showing off our ability to search television for mentions of interest, we occasionally field questions about the variety of applications for the data. In general, SnapStream customers are able to search, clip and distribute content of interest from a single user interface. Using closed captioning, SnapStream brings a user directly to any mention of interest within a recorded broadcast. Occasionally, especially in a University or Public Relations setting, the topic turns to statistical analysis. While our solution does not currently offer a statistical engine, the data is easily exported for analysis.
(First time visitors: Welcome to SnapStream! We make TV search software used by organizations, like the Daily Show, to search inside TV shows. And it's not too expensive, starting at $2,000. Read on or learn more about our products.)
Today, we're launching SnapStream TV Trends (http://www.snapstream.com/tvtrends/), a tool that allows you to track trends on national television here in the United States.
I was deep in marketing-land on Thursday (also known as "writing a case study"), when I heard about the US Airways plane that crash-landed in the Hudson. I grew up in Houston, but lived in NYC for 5 years and moved back last year. I still have lots of friends there...so when I hear news like that coming out of NY I still feel like it's My News and it feels personal. Within minutes, my boss showed me that rescue picture that Janis Krums took from the ferry and posted to Twitter. I was really amazed by how quickly that picture got out. I watched as the number of "views" went from the dozens to the thousands. It was posted and cross-posted on lots of different blogs as the page views overloaded the Twitter server. Twitter is an amazing thing. I posted it to my Facebook page; I had friends in NY who learned of the plane crash from my Facebook post. Incredible.
Yesterday, I was wondering who got more national TV coverage during the Republican and the Democratic Conventions, so I decided to put the mostly-hidden graphing feature in SnapStream Enterprise through its paces.
