SnapStream Server
Encyclopedia
The SnapStream Server is a cross between a DVR
DVR
The initialism "DVR", when used by itself, can refer to:* Digital video recorder* Discrete valuation ring* Distance-vector routing* Direct volume rendering* Derwent Valley Railway * Devco Railway...
and a search engine that enables organizations to monitor television
Media monitoring
Media monitoring is the activity of monitoring the output of the print, online and broadcast media. It can be conducted for a variety of reasons, including political, commercial, scientific, and so on.-In Business:...
based on the closed captioning
Closed captioning
Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it...
mandated by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...
(FCC) attached to every program. The hybrid DVR-search engine is a product of convergence
Technological convergence
Technological convergence is the tendency for different technological systems to evolve towards performing similar tasks. Convergence can refer to previously separate technologies such as voice , data , and video that now share resources and interact with each other synergistically.The rise of...
from Houston-based software developers at SnapStream Media
SnapStream Media
SnapStream Media is a privately held software company based in Houston, Texas, USA that focuses on building fluent user experiences in digital entertainment software...
, originally known for their consumer product Beyond TV.
The rack-mounted SnapStream Server connects to a PC
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
running the client software, Enterprise TV Link, made for Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
. One SnapStream TV search engine can record up to 10 channels simultaneously and internally store 30 TB
Terabyte
The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units , and therefore 1 terabyte is , or 1 trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes...
, which equals approximately 17,000 hours of video content; the absolute archiving capacity depends on the user-selected recording quality (at X megabits per second).
The client-server model allows one computer to host all your media storage and TV tuning hardware, while other computers are connected to it via a known local area network (LAN
Län
Län and lääni refer to the administrative divisions used in Sweden and previously in Finland. The provinces of Finland were abolished on January 1, 2010....
) that can stream this information.
TV search
Often referred to as a TV search appliance , the SnapStream Server allows organizations to closely interact with television from a PCPersonal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
, using a graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
and electronic program guide
Electronic program guide
Electronic program guides and interactive program guides provide users of television, radio, and other media applications with continuously updated menus displaying broadcast programming or scheduling information for current and upcoming programming...
similar to familiar consumer products like Beyond TV, TiVo
TiVo
TiVo is a digital video recorder developed and marketed by TiVo, Inc. and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose features include "Season Pass" schedules which record every new episode of a series, and "WishList"...
and Sky+
Sky+
Sky+, or Sky Plus, is a personal video recorder service for Sky in the UK. Launched in September 2001, it allows the user to record, pause and instantly rewind live TV. The system performs these functions using an internal hard drive inside the Sky+ set top box...
.
All recorded programs are indexed in real time
Real-time operating system
A real-time operating system is an operating system intended to serve real-time application requests.A key characteristic of a RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application's task; the variability is jitter...
, providing a live platform to search inside television with the user mechanics of a web search engine
Web search engine
A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...
. Type in a string of keywords to pull up relevant search results, click on a video to watch it and view the program in key context with the closed captioning displayed. The user
User (computing)
A user is an agent, either a human agent or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified by a username , screen name , nickname , or handle, which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term.Users are...
can then collaborate with television by creating clips in portable file formats to e-mail or burn to DVD.
TV alerts
To automate repeat searches, the user can configure SnapStream TV Alerts, which are keyword-generated e-mail notifications based on a prescribed set of search terms. It works similarly to Google AlertsGoogle Alerts
Google Alerts is content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google, that automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs, video and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user and stored by the Google...
, yet instead of pushing news from the Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, SnapStream TV Alerts extracts news from traditional television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
.
Features
Functions of Enterprise TV Search include:- ClippingVideo clipVideo clips are short clips of video, usually part of a longer recording. The term is also more loosely used to mean any short video less than the length of a traditional television program.- On the Internet :...
: the ability to cut out and save a segment from a full-length program - Multi-channel recording: the ability to monitor several channels simultaneously
- StreamingStreaming mediaStreaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
: the ability to playback video on other computers over the LAN - SmartSkip: the ability to automatically detect scene changes, including commercials, and then jump quickly between them
- ShowSqueeze: the ability to transcodeTranscodeTranscoding is the direct digital-to-digital data conversion of one encoding to another, such as for movie data files or audio files. This is usually done in cases where a target device does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size, or to convert...
or compress your TV recordings to other formats - Placeshifting: the ability to remotely view live or recorded media via the Internet