SnapStream Enterprise Blog

In the fast-moving world of politics, being able to monitor television media’s reaction to political issues – in real time - and the ability to respond quickly and appropriately are key. In the case studies below, we looked into how SnapStream’s TV search technology is used to solve media monitoring problems in the realm of politics – first for a candidate running for president, and the second, for a political video blogger.

Monitoring Television in Hillary Clinton’s Race to the White House The Clinton Campaign’s switch from a combination of VCRs, DVRs and clipping services to the SnapStream Enterprise TV search appliance greatly improved their effectiveness and timeliness in reacting to issues in the fast-moving and complex world of political campaigns.

Read about how the Clinton Campaign used our TV search appliance to monitor television media.

The Jed Report’s Search for Timely Political Television: For Jed Lewison, the influential political video blogger behind the Jed Report and Daily Kos TV, SnapStream Enterprise gave him the ability to quickly and easily find and work with pertinent network TV clips, saving him both time and hassle. It enables him to focus on what was most important to him in his video blogs: the content itself.

Read about how Jed uses the SnapStream TV search appliance to streamline his workflow.

Jed Lewison, the video blogger behind The Jed Report, has been using SnapStream’s TV search appliance to make his point:

• The FOX Propaganda Network By The Numbers
  
• ACORN-Mania: FOX vs. The Middle Class

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.

I have a SnapStream Enterprise TV Server that records all national TV news programs (including financial news and sports news programs).  I had it produce a graph of daily mentions of McCain, Palin, Obama and Biden.  And then I took the graph it created (and, yes, I agree with you, our graphs are very ‘Lotus 1-2-3′ — we’re working on improving this) and added some annotations of my own:

(click to see a larger version)

My takeaways:

• Biden’s not getting much TV coverage!  He had a big spike when he was announced as the Democratic VP candidate, but he hasn’t had much TV coverage after that.
• The Democratic VP nominee (Biden) got a bigger spike in coverage when he was announced than Republican VP nominee (Palin) did when she was announced, but…
• Palin’s overall received more coverage than Biden (this, in spite of Biden’s 1+ week head start)
• Obama received more coverage during the Democratic Convention than McCain received during the Republican Convention.
• Palin and McCain have been getting almost equal mentions on TV since the Republican Convention was kicked off.  In contrast Obama is getting maybe 5x more mentions than his VP candidate!
• Finally, over labor day weekend, Hurricane Gustav killed nearly all discussion of the presidential campaigns!

So in conclusion, Gustav was the winner over the two conventions of the past two weeks!

Matthew Ericson at the New York Times did a really cool visualization last week, “The Words They Used“, comparing the most frequently used words at the Democratic and Republican Conventions (from the article, “Republicans were more likely to talk about businesses and taxes, while Democrats were more likely to mention jobs or the economy.”)

This got me thinking about doing something similar for TV programs.  So I did an experiment using the excellent word cloud generator Wordle on transcripts (generated with a single click from a SnapStream TV search appliance for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly last week (the week of the Republican Convention in Minneapolis).  The results:

Monday, September 1, 2008

»The O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

(there wasn’t a new episode on Monday!)

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

A few notes:

So what do you think? Are these visualizations interesting? What are your observations? I’m not someone who has a background doing content analysis so hopefully I can get some experts to give me their conclusions.

We’ve improved existing features and added a few new ones to our TV Search Appliance in turn making recording, searching, clipping, and archiving television more efficient for your organization. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new.

24×7 Recordings: We’ve enhanced this feature to now show the program guide data, not just recorded time blocks, when you record every show airing on any one channel.

Archived Closed-Captioning: If enabled, this feature will automatically archive the metadata of a deleted recording. This will allow you to continue to search through the recording once the audio and video have been deleted.

“Did you mean…”: If you happen to mis-type or mis-spell a search term a “Did you mean…” message will appear to aid you in your search.

Email Clips: Now you can email clips directly from the Viewscape or Web Admin with the click of a single button.  SnapStream Enterprise will automatically convert the clip to your choice of Windows Media Video or H.264 so the attachment is as small as possible.

My Clips Folder: Once you have created a clip on your Enterprise TV Link Client the clip will automatically be added to your “My Clips” folder for easier access.  And you can still access all the clips on the SnapStream Enterprise TV Server.

Library Folder Permissions: Grant or restrict specific user groups permission to view and access particular video folders in the library.

Improved Logging: The view log is now user-specific. It includes documented user log-ins and detailed use by user.

Faster Scheduler: The new scheduler is now 80 times quicker than before allowing you to manage larger recording schedules faster.

So check out the release notes for SnapStream Enterprise for the complete scoop and existing customers can upgrade their SnapStream Enterprise TV Server and their SnapStream Enterprise Link clients.

Last weekend the Houston Technology Center hosted BarCampHouston3. For those of you asking yourself what exactly a BarCamp event is, well it’s a way for techies to meet up, mingle, network, and exchange ideas. Our very own Rakesh Agrawal headed over to HTC and was interviewed by Mike McGuff, Multimedia Web Producer at KTRK-ABC. Rakesh answers the who, what, how and why on SnapStream’s Enterprise TV Search Appliance. Check out the interview below.

Coming to a city near you, SnapStream Media will be showcasing the latest in their TV search technology. Learn more about the Enterprise TV search appliance from any of the sales engineers by visiting them at any of the following conferences:

Morning Show Boot Camp – Denver, CO
July 31st – August 2nd; Exhibit Area
Geared towards morning-talk broadcasters, this conference is loaded with panels and sessions covering every aspect of producing an engaging morning radio broadcast.

Association of Public Safety Communications Officers – Kansas City, MO
August 3rd – August 7th; Booth # 141
A conference catering to the the professional needs of Public Safety Communications Officers - from examining standards and issues to providing education, products and services.

Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication – Chicago, IL
August 6th – August 9th; Table #25
The conference program includes the latest in technology as well as special sessions on teaching, research and public service in the various components of journalism and mass communication.

Texas Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors – Fort Worth, TX
August 7th – August 8th; Exhibit Area
The TATOA conference is dedicated to educating local government officials to better serve their citizens in the development, regulation, and administration of cable television and other telecommunications systems.

Can’t make any of the appearances, well sign up for an online webinar or email enterprise@snapstream.com to schedule a demo.

Jeff Jarvis wrote a blog post last week about how he thought the word “actually” was overused on television. Here’s the post (he lost a bunch of posts and hasn’t restored them all):

Actually is the new ‘y’know’
July 19th, 2008, by Jeff Jarvis

The most overused and unnecessary word on broadcast is “actually.” Start counting how many times it is used by TV people and you’ll hate me for driving you nuts.

While I’m kvetching, why do TV people introduce a panel of three people and then say, “Mr. Jones, let me start with you.” Just start with him: ask your question. Why this need to warn Mr. Jones?

Our TV search appliance is used by a number of journalism schools for content analysis (like Emerson College and GWU, so this got me thinking about how we might try and use our product to measure Jeff’s assertion about the word actually.

So here’s what I did. I took one week of national TV recordings that we had made on a SnapStream Enterprise TV Server and I did some ad-hoc analysis (remember, I’m not expert on content analysis!) on how frequently the word ‘actually’ appeared by series and by network.

Here are the 20 shows that use the word ‘actually’ the most:

And here are the 20 shows that use the word ‘actually’ the least:

And here’s a summary of the the word ‘actually’ by network:

Here’s all the data if you want to dig deeper.

So at the higher end, offending shows are using the word ‘actually’ between once every 10 minutes to once every 3 minutes. Since I’m not a content analysis expert, what other trends can you draw? How could the test be improved?

This coming week, some of us from SnapStream are headed to San Antonio, TX to attend and exhibit at one of the largest annual ‘technology in education’ events here in the U.S. — the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC).  SnapStream will be on the exhibit floor in booth #3034 (here’s a map), if you’re looking for us.

But since this will be our first time at NECC and, really, our first time at any kind of large gathering of K-12 and university educators, I figure it’s a good time to explain what we know about the value proposition of SnapStream to K-12 schools and universities.

When I was in grade school, there wasn’t a lot of technology in the classroom. My Houston public elementary school had a shared area of “pods”, each with headphones and cassette players where we’d do “SRA” and every so often, our teacher would haul in an 8mm projector on a cart and we’d all take a nap while the lights were out… but I digress. And the private high school that I attended had a few computer labs, but that’s about it. That was technology for me in grade school. Today, I’m amazed at the technology that I see used in the classroom — and, as I’ve learned, television is one of the many educational tools found in today’s classroom. For some background on how television gets used in education, check out Cable in the Classroom. So delivering television into the classroom is the first thing that SnapStream Enterprise does for K-12 schools and universities:

1. Distribution of television to the classroom (over the LAN)

With SnapStream Enterprise, schools can distribute television over their LANs to all their classrooms. And in most cases, they can do this using their existing TCP/IP infrastructure and their existing PCs and display projectors in the classroom. For new schools, using the LAN to distribute TV can eliminate the need to install expensive extra RF cable infrastructure. And through the easy-to-use SnapStream PC client software, teachers can not only watch live TV, they can also watch recorded TV, schedule new recordings and search TV recordings (more on this below). With the ability to schedule recordings and play them back anytime, teachers aren’t tied to the broadcast schedule and can integrate TV shows into their curricula whenever they’d like.

Here’s a journalism professor at Emerson College using the SnapStream Enterprise client software to bring TV into the classroom. This is a university but it’s the same idea at the K-12 level…

2. SnapStream’s TV search allows educators to harness TV in new ways

SnapStream’s TV search technology allows teachers to easily search inside TV recordings. For anyone that hasn’t seen our TV search technology in action, see this TV alerts screenshot or see this video demo of SnapStream Enterprise’s TV search capabilities.

With our search technology and our built-in clipping functions, teachers can ferret out relevant and useful snippets of TV content for use in their classes. Any clip can be downloaded and easily integrated into a teacher’s Powerpoint or other presentation.

For example, if a teacher wanted to talk about the California wildfires in his social studies class, he could:
1) do a search on “California wildfires”,
2) get these TV search results:

3) watch each segment,
4) clip the segments he wants to use in his class and, finally,
5) download the clips for inclusion in his presentation.

And this would all be possible for the teacher to do from his classroom PC, without anyone else’s help — no need for anyone from A/V or the library to get involved. This is one example of how we think our TV search technology can make TV accessible and useful to educators in new ways.

3. Student projects and assignment

Because SnapStream Enterprise makes television accessible from any LAN accessible PC, it can be installed on library PCs, computer labs or other public-area computers. And then teachers can give homework and other assignments built around SnapStream Enterprise. For example, a teacher could give students an assignment to watch a presidential debate using SnapStream Enterprise or they could ask their students to do a comparison of how one TV network’s coverage of a particular candidate differs from another TV networks coverage of the same candidate.

And SnapStream Enterprise has access control functions built-in so users can be given varying levels of permissions. For example, students can be given one set of permissions while administrators can have their own set of permissions.

4. Content analysis and research for journalism, media studies and political science

For people who do what’s known as “content analysis” on broadcast television, this one doesn’t require much explanation. Rather than having to manually watch potentially hundreds of TV news broadcasts and transcribe their contents (heretofore the exclusive job of poor, underpaid grad students!), SnapStream Enterprise automatically provides a full text transcript for any recorded TV program. A sample TV show transcript exported from a SnapStream Enterprise TV Server:

Those transcripts can then be exported from SnapStream Enterprise and pulled into 3rd party software for coding and textual analysis or SnapStream’s TV search technology can be used to do things like word frequency. If don’t know what content analysis is and you’re still wondering, here’s an example of the kind of findings that might come out of a content analysis.

So that’s a quick run down of what I know about how SnapStream Enterprise useful to universities and K-12 schools. We already have a number of customers in the area of education (in particular, amongst journalism schools) but we’re looking forward to talking to a lot more and learning more about the problems that exist amongst teachers and professors trying to leverage television in education. Are you an educator that uses television in your teaching curriculum? Is there something you’d like to see our product do? Leave a comment below!

We often get the question, “How does SnapStream’s TV search appliance work?” so here’s a brief explanation.

First, for anyone new to SnapStream’s TV search technology, a quick summary of what it is: SnapStream Enterprise is an “appliance” that allows an organization to record lots of television and then search inside those recordings.  By “appliance”, we just mean that the product is a self-contained server that you buy from us that’s quick and easy to setup.  Here’s what the hardware looks like:

Once you have a SnapStream Enterprise TV Server setup, the first thing you’d typically do is tell it what you want it to record.  You can do this using the SnapStream program guide — you can record a single instance of a show, you can record every instance of a show, or you can record a particular channel 24 hours a day:

Once recordings are made, you can search inside those recordings for anything you might be looking for.  Some examples of TV search scenarios:

• A presidential campaign wants to search for every mention of their candidate and their candidate’s competition is mentioned on TV — so they can respond to that TV coverage more efficiently.
• A city government wants to search all of their local TV stations for mentions of their police department, their fire department, and anything else related to their city government.
• A television comedy show (like The Soup on E!) wants to search thousands of hours of television for things to make fun of.
• A journalism department at a university wants to do a type of research called content analysis (also known as textual analysis), so they use our search technology to chart word frequencies over time.
• …and the list goes on.

As an example of our TV search results, here’s an ad-hoc search that I did on “George Carlin” (I ran this query just now on Friday, June 27, 2008):

You’ll see for each search result, there’s

• the name of the program that contained the match,
• the time at which the match occurred (for example, Anderson Cooper 360 at 8:59pm yesterday),
• and finally there’s an excerpt of the transcript with the matching words bold-faced.

(A side note: you can also setup SnapStream Alerts that would e-mail you everytime certain words appeared on television — the results would look similar, but you’d get them on e-mail).

So how does our TV search technology work?  It searches over a combination of

• closed-captioning data and
• program guide data.

The FCC requires closed-captioning to be included on almost all TV programming (more on the details of this on the fcc.gov website).  So while SnapStream Enterprise is making a recording, it also simultaneously records all of the closed-captioning data for that show.  In the process of recording the closed-captioning, SnapStream Enterprise does some clean-up of the text to make it easier to read and easier to search.  And then we index all of that text in a time-coded fashion, so when we find a match, we can direct the user to not only the program where the match occurred, but also to the time within that program.  Program guide data is also used in our search process so users can easily filter searches by program genre, by channel, or by program title.

In addition to being simple to use, the SnapStream TV search engine also offers up a lot of power in the hopes that our customers can find whatever it is they are looking for on television.  More on this in the next blog posting!  Meanwhile, if you have any questions, post ‘em in the comments.