"SnapStream's 'TV Searcher' Blog" - 5 new articles
Visualizing The State of the Union
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. Politics aside, I have downloaded the closed-caption text from Wednesday night’s (January 27, 2010) State of the Union. Using the word cloud creator at Wordle.net, I quickly created the above symbolic representation of the speech. The 75-minute speech generated over 7,000 words, of which, the top 200 are represented in the cloud. Wordle.net has the option to remove “common” words – looks to be mostly prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns – to get at the meat of the text . The more appearances a word makes in the text, the larger the word is portrayed in the cloud. The top five words from the speech were People, Americans, Year, Jobs and Work. The overall process took less than 5 minutes – in fact, it took considerably less time than creating this post. How did we learn of this capability? Interestingly enough, a customer turned us on to the ability during last years election. Ultimately, the goal was statistical analysis of candidate speeches – the cloud representation was just a by-product. We are never ceased to be amazed at the uses customers find for our products. Television news in 2009: Twitter, infidelity and more(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.) At SnapStream we’ve been hanging onto every word uttered on traditional TV by talking heads and news anchors on major network channels. The data we gathered with SnapStream TV Trends in 2009 gave us an exciting glimpse of the year in television. In case you’re new here, you might be wondering, “What is SnapStream TV Trends?” It’s a service we run that lets you see how often words are mentioned, over time, on national TV news. We record and analyze transcripts from national TV news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN and it’s all powered by SnapStream’s TV search technology. Here’s a look at some of the trends we saw on TV in 2009: Top TV News Trends This probably comes as no surprise to anyone: the death of Michael Jackson was easily the most spiky news of the year. In the month between June 26, the day after the King of Pop died, and July 25, “Michael Jackson” was mentioned more than ten times as often as “Obama” in television news. Overall, the top ten spiking terms in television this year:
See their TV Trends graphs: Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy). Twitter: the leading social network… on TV In 2009, Twitter became a staple of traditional television — as channel for two way communication, as a source of breaking news, and simply as a source for what people were saying about a particular topic. Search for “Twitter” in Snapstream TV Trends and you’ll see that news and current events TV programs used the word “Twitter” in their programming three times more often in December 2009 than they did in late 2008 and January 2009. And how do mentions of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace on traditional television compare? Take a look:
So even though Facebook has scads more users (Wikipedia says it’s Facebook’s 350M vs. Twitter’s 45M), you can see that twitter gets more mentions of TV. So maybe Dave Winer is right and twitter is “a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future”! Health Care, the New Buzz The economy reigned the news last year, but in 2009, health care was on the lips of news programs everywhere. Compare “health care” and “economy” in Snapstream TV Trends and you can see the economy dominated the national dialog at the beginning of the 2009, but by the end of the year mentions of health-care topics far eclipsed the economy:
Infidelity in 2009: Tiger Woods vs. David Letterman We all know the media loves a good scandal, and 2009 was rife with scandal. We learned politicians like Mark Sanford and John Edwards strayed from their wives as well as sports superstar Tiger Woods and late night TV host David Letterman. It seems like fidelity was in short supply. The media treats each scandal differently, following every lead and looking for the best angle to capture viewer attention. It would appear that the perpetrator is a sitting duck once his secret is out. All he can do is try not to say anything incriminating and hope the story dies, right? Not so. Compare the David Letterman and Tiger Woods scandals: On the surface these stories are remarkably similar. Both involve major celebrities. Both involve multiple transgressions and married men. And yet David Letterman didn’t get nearly as much media scrutiny as Tiger Woods got and is still getting, despite the added complexity of blackmail in David Letterman’s case. Strikingly, David Letterman got almost as much heat for making fun of Sarah Palin as for sleeping with his staff. Moral of the story: When caught with your pants down, what you do and how you present yourself determines how much the media is willing to forgive, and how quickly they will forget. Wonder what else is driving national television trends? Check out the Snapstream TV Trends tool to see for yourself and share any interesting observations you make in the comments below. – Aaron Mielke, Software Engineer The Daily Show and Colbert Report go with SnapStream(First time visitors: Welcome to SnapStream! We make TV search software used by organizations to search inside TV shows. And it’s not too expensive, starting at $2,000. What’s TV search, you ask? Watch this YouTube video or visit our website to learn more.)
“Part of what makes the Daily Show and the Colbert Report great is their satire of news stories, media organizations and political figures. So they are very serious about monitoring television! As the shows deploy SnapStream, we believe our TV search technology will prove invaluable and essential to them—technically and creatively,” said Rakesh Agrawal, SnapStream’s CEO and Founder. “And their selection of SnapStream, after a rigorous evaluation process, validates the uniqueness and power of our TV search technology for any organizations that needs to monitor television.” The SnapStream TV search solution to be deployed at the Daily Show and Colbert Report will provide for a completely high-definition (HD) workflow, allowing the show’s producers to centrally record and archive more than 30 channels of traditional HDTV; then subsequently search those recordings, create clips that can interact with Avid and Final Cut Pro video editing systems. Visit the http://www.snapstream.com/ website to learn more about SnapStream’s affordable and effective TV search technology – our turn-key TV search appliances starting at $2,000. About SnapStream Media, Inc. SnapStream allows organizations to put their finger on the pulse of traditional television. Customers can record a virtually unlimited number of TV shows from satellite, cable or antenna and then search inside those TV shows to pinpoint television content of interest. Existing customers include government organizations, such as the U.S. Senate and the City of New York, to educational institutions at the university and K-12 level to entertainment organizations such as Comcast Entertainment, Current TV, and MTV. ### How to create your own (analog) cable TV head-end
OverviewSnapStream’s TV search products are used by organizations that strategically value TV. And, as it turns out, a lot of these customers see benefits from modulating their own in-house cable TV line-up. For most people, modulating their own in-house cable TV makes it easier to distribute television within their organizations. We have a lot of customers who already have their own cable head-ends but we also come across a lot of customers who ask us, “How do I build my own cable head-end?” This article is for those customers. Why build my own cable head-end?First of all, why would you want to build a cable head-end? Why not just take the regular cable signal from your cable provider and distribute that over RF around your organization? Well, for a lot of people “regular” cable (ie what you get without any kind of a receiver or set-top box) doesn’t include channels that are important to them. Regular cable might not include certain sports packages – like NFL Sunday Ticket or NBA League Pass on DirecTV – or other channels. For example, say CSPAN is important to you. Well, here in Houston, TX, our local cable provider (Comcast) has been moving channels from the “analog” spectrum into the digital only spectrum and CSPAN has been one of the channels that’s been moved. So the only way to get CPSAN in Houston on Comcast is using a digital cable box (or a DTA – digital to analog – box). And if you want to distribute that channel around to various TVs in your office without a digital cable box at every TV, then you look at building your own regular cable head-end! Another reason why you might want to modulate your own cable line-up is you might want to include non-TV channels on your cable line-up. For example, maybe you have a few security cameras that you want to modulate to certain channels on your cable system. Does SnapStream’s TV Search appliances support custom channel line-ups?In a word, yes. Just give us the details and we’ll setup a custom channel line-up for your organization that exactly matches how you have things setup. So the program guide will work 100% in the SnapStream software. How do I build my own cable head-end?So how do you create your own cable head-end? It’s surprisingly easy. Here’s a high-level overview of what your system will look like:
1. Your TV source is usually going to be either satellite (here in the US that means DirecTV or Dish) or digital cable. Depending on how many channels you’re modulating (‘n’ in the above diagram), you’ll need a corresponding number of receivers or set-top boxes from your provider. And if you’re using a satellite service like DirecTV, you’ll need a multi-port switch to drive all of those set-top boxes off of one satellite dish. A multi-port switch is a sort of splitter for satellite service. 2. Each set-top box is set to a particular channel on that TV source. Then that set-top box connects to it’s corresponding modulator via RCA video and audio cables. Generally speaking, analog modulators come in two varieties:
The typical recommendation, as I’ve heard it, is that most of your modulators can be “channelized” and then maybe you add a few “agile” modulators in case you need to modulate to some random channels later down the line. 3. And then each of the modulators connects to the combiner via RF and the combiner mashes all the channels together into one RF signal. There are two types of combiners – ones with amplifiers built-in (“active combiners”) and ones without amplifiers (“passive combiners”). Depending on how you’re distributing RF (the next step), an “active” combiner might save you the need for a dedicated RF amplifier on the output of the combiner. 4. Last but not least, you need to distribute your new cable signal throughout your organization. Designing an RF distribution system is a separate topic unto itself (discussion of splitters and taps, signal loss of distance, etc.), but for simple configurations, you just need to amplify the signal at the exit to the combiner. How much you need to amplify it depends on how many ways you’re splitting it and how long the distances are in your RF network. If you’re doing all of this so you can record TV and search over it with SnapStream, your SnapStream Server is 100% compatible with your new custom cable line-up. We have the ability to create custom line-ups so your program guide in SnapStream exactly matches how you have your channels configured. Ballpark PricingYou’ll need to contact a vendor or distributor of this equipment, but our quick calculations had the per channel cost of the modulators and combiners (EXCLUDING the cost of any multi-port switch, receivers, and RF distribution stuff), if you’re using “channelized” (ie “fixed”) modulators, come out to $150 / channel. And if you’re going with “agile” modulators, then the cost might go up to something like $250 / channel. Now this is just eyeball pricing. ConclusionThat’s it… Thanks to my friends at Blonder Tongue for their help in putting this together. And if you’re reading this and want to be able to record LOTS of TV and then search inside those TV shows, let us know. That’s what our product, SnapStream, is all about! Feature Spotlight: Access ControlsSnapStream Enterprise TV, the software that runs our TV servers, has a lot of different features that make it suitable for a lot of different tasks. But as someone once said, with great power comes great responsibility!  "With great power comes great responsibilty." - Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker Because the server has a lot of different functions, it may be accessible to a lot of different users – for example, at one educational institution, the SnapStream server is accessible to professors and students from a dozen different classes, as well as departmental staff, research assistants and IT. The server might be in use for two or three different purposes at any given time. That means a lot of users with different and sometimes competing needs, who have a lot of opportunities to get in each others’ way. Fortunately, we also have some very powerful and versatile tools for wrangling your user base.
User Groups
A detailed description of what each permission does is available in our help file.
Predefined groups
Administrators: These users can do everything on the server, including change user permissions, so put only your most trusted and knowledgeable users in this group. An unskilled user in this group can do a lot of damage by accident. For example, as happened to one client, a user might decide it’s a good idea to automatically ShowSqueeze all of your recordings to H.264 and then delete the originals- which might not be such a big deal, except this user’s plan was to burn their recordings to DVD. Since H.264 can’t be burned to DVD, they were out of luck!
Live TV Viewers: These users can’t schedule recordings, but they can view Live TV and create TV Alerts. Note that Live TV can’t ever cause a recording to be blocked- these guys are one step below Basic Schedulers.
How permissions affect the user experience
This helps ensure that users are steered towards the functions that you want them to perform without getting distracted by trying to fiddle with settings or change the recording schedule.
First, create a folder to which these “hidden recordings” will be saved.
Make sure that the Folder Security option is Enabled, as in the screenshot above. You’ll see your user groups in a picklist. Simply select the groups that you want to have access the folder. To select multiple groups, hold the CTRL key and click on the group names. Now, we need to create a recording that will be saved to the hidden folder. The easiest way to do this is by using the scheduling tools in the web admin. To create a manual recording, mouse over Setup Recordings and select Create New Recording.
Set the recording options however you want, and for Target Video Folder, select the hidden folder. (Note that the user creating the recording will need to have access to the hidden folder in order to select it from the drop-down menu). All recordings created by this job will now be saved to the hidden folder. If you want to create a hidden recording from the Program Guide, first schedule the recording through the guide as normal. Then, you can change the Target Video Folder by Editing the recording, through Setup Recordings=> Recording Manager. LDAP integration
Configuring LDAP integration is a three-step process.
3. Go to Settings=> Advanced Settings=> User Configuration. Add a new LDAP-linked group for each LDAP group that should have access, select the LDAP group that you want, and specify the permission settings. Note that users who aren’t in an LDAP group that is “linked” in this way won’t be able to log in.
A few words about security
When you’re logging in to the web admin, you may see a page like the following:
This is a result of our implementation of SSL encryption in the web admin. The security handshake that allows your web browser to trust a site using SSL depends on a certificate that verifies the network name and domain of the server. Since that information is different for every installation, SnapStream can’t provide a security certificate with new servers, which is why this error appears. However, it does NOT mean that the security of the TV server is compromised- it just means that your browser can’t verify the name of the TV server. This error screen can be bypassed safely. If you’d like to purchase a security certificate for the server, we have instructions posted in our knowledgebase . Please note that this only applies to the secure side of the web admin- that is, if the text in the address bar of your browser begins with HTTPS. If the address begins with HTTP, you’re accessing the nonsecure side of the web admin, and your password will be transmitted in plain text, so be careful. For a demonstration of user account management, watch the video below. More Recent Articles |
We don’t do a lot of press releases anymore, but here’s one that went out earlier this morning. Congrats to my team here at SnapStream!
