Cool! SnapStream’s TV search technology got a nice mention on the popular podcast “This Week in Tech (TWiT)” (link) yesterday.
You can find the episode here and the mention is at the 1 hour, 16 minutes, 35 second mark (1:16:35s).
Here’s a transcript of the mention:
Leo Laporte: You know who does that so well is the Daily Show? I don’t know who they’ve got as their librarian or their editors.
Dwight Silverman: SnapStream, they’re using a company called SnapStream based here in Houston.
Leo Laporte: Really?
Dwight Silverman: Yeah, that basically does contextual searches within video.
Leo Laporte: Because they can find anything. I mean they’ll pull up… in real-time almost. They’ve got a clip reel on the daily show and it’s just amazing.
Dwight Silverman: Yeah it’s a great company, they’ve been around for a long time. They started out with a product that was similar to TIVO for PCs. They got out of the consumer market… Beyond TV is what’s it’s called.
Leo Laporte: Oh yeah, I remember that.
Dwight Silverman: They’ve kind of moved out of the consumer market and are selling this technology to companies like the Daily Show.
Leo Laporte: So… is it done automatically by computers or they have humans tagging it?
Brett Larson: They could be taking in the closed captioning and marrying it to the video stream.
Baseball junkies rejoice! Today we announced MLB Network as the newest SnapStream customer. If you love baseball as much as I do, you’re familiar with MLB Network. Spring training is around the corner. I wonder if they have any news about my Astros…
press release:
MLB Network Chooses SnapStream to Monitor and Search Television
Houston TX, (PRWEB) February 22, 2010 – SnapStream Media, Inc. announced today that MLB Network, the ultimate television destination for baseball fans, will install SnapStream’s TV search technology to monitor the competitive landscape, showcase their on-air marketing executions, and support business development efforts by providing the company with competitive intelligence.
“We will be taking aired content and creating packaged distribution to advertisers, affiliates, and for national and local marketing opportunities,” said Mark Haden, MLB Network’s VP of Engineering and IT. “We had used a variety of methods and SnapStream will allow us a single solution. The user interface is very intuitive and to be able to search using a published program schedule is very slick.”
“MLB Network is one of the most forward-thinking players in the industry,” said Rakesh Agrawal, Founder and CEO of SnapStream. “Having chosen SnapStream over a number of alternative solutions, including building a custom solution in-house, ultimately SnapStream made the cut because we offer a turnkey solution and an ease-of-use that is unmatched in any other product or solution, which re-affirms SnapStream as the optimal way for government, education and entertainment organizations to monitor television.”
The SnapStream TV search solution to be deployed at MLB Network will allow staff to centrally record and archive 4 channels of television; then subsequently search those recordings, create clips, and burn those clips to DVD.
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.
At the end of last year, I wrote a blog posting about how to create your own analog TV headend. Today, I’m going to talk about how to do accomplish the same thing, but with digital, high-definition television.
Standard-definition analog TV is fine for some media monitoring and TV recording scenarios. But in other scenarios you might want to record TV shows in the highest quality possible.
Maybe you produce a TV show, like The Soup or , the Daily Show/Colbert Report and when you include a TV clip inside your show, you want it to show up at the highest quality possible.
Or maybe you’re a non-profit that wants to showcase your media mentions on television at the highest possible quality to donors.
For scenarios such as these, you want to record television in high-definition and be able to search within those recordings in high-definition as well.
There are a couple of ways to make HD recordings and be able to search within them:
Recording ATSC
ATSC is the standard by which digital TV is transmitted over-the-air in the United States. It’s transmitted without encryption, so recording and searching TV broadcast over ATSC is pretty easy. Just get and install an antenna for your physical location and connect the output from that antenna to your SnapStream TV search appliance (note: it has to be one of our HD-capable appliances) and just use SnapStream as you would with any other TV source… we have full program guide data for ATSC signals in the United States and parts of Canada and using ATSC with SnapStream is really straightforward.
But what if you want to record something in high-definition that’s not available over the air? What if you want to record something like ESPN HD or CNN HD or MSNBC HD?
Well, then you’ll need to build your own QAM headend. What’s that? Read on…
Building your own unencrypted QAM headend
To make high-definition (HD) recordings of channels that aren’t available over-the-air (OTA), you’ll need to build your own unencrypted QAM head-end. Unencrypted QAM, like ATSC, is something that SnapStream’s HD TV search appliance can take as an input and record from.
Building your own unencrypted QAM head-end is pretty similar to building an analog TV headend. You follow the same basic steps:
1) get your TV sources
2) modulate each source to QAM
3) combine the modulated channels into one feed!
So for step 1, you’ll simply get your high-definition TV source from whatever provider you choose — this might be from a digital cable provider (like Comcast or Time Warner Cable) or from a satellite service (DirecTV or DISH). For each channel you want to modulate, you’ll need a single receiver (or set-top box). And each of these receivers need to be capable of high-definition TV. You should also choose a receiver that can output HDMI or component while also outputting analog composite or s-video. The analog composite or s-video is how, in most cases, you’ll be able to access the closed-captioning for searching with SnapStream.
Then for step 2 (modulating each source to QAM), we recommend using a simple one-box QAM modulation solution. There are three such solutions that we know of on the market today, and we’ve heard of a bunch more that are coming — there seems to be a rising demand for one-box QAM modulation solutions. More on this below.
Then in step 3, you would simply combine all of these signals together using a combiner, much as we described in our article on how to build an analog headend (link).
The one-box QAM modulation devices (ie what you need for step 2) that are a) shipping today, b) that we’ve tested in the lab here at SnapStream, are:
Blonder Tongue’s HDE-QAM: This is a pretty simple box that takes in HDMI, modulates its audio and video to unencrypted QAM, and outputs it via coax. The HDE-QAM also has an ethernet port for accessing it’s web-based settings page where you can configure the channel/sub-channel to which it modulates and the quality (bit-rate) at which the encoding happens. Images of the front and the back of the Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM:
The Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM appears to have been around the longest amount of time — we learned about it in March of 2009. The list price for the Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM is $10,000 (we expect this to come down). More information on the HDE-QAM can be found on Blonder Tongue’s website: HDE-QAM spec sheet (pdf), HDE-QAM presentation (pdf).
Adtec’s HDMI-2-QAM: The Adtec HDMI-2-QAM (product page) is less expensive than the Blonder Tongue AND has more features. Like the Blonder Tongue HDE-QAM, the Adtec takes in HDMI, but it can handle two channels in its 1U chassis. So it takes two HDMI inputs and modulates both of those to a single QAM channel, each on its own sub-channel. It also is supposed to have support for passing closed-captioning through (which the Blonder Tongue unit does not have support for), though at the time of writing this blog posting, this was still being worked on and should be fully enabled in a soon-to-be-released firmware update. One important note: the Adtec HDMI-2-QAM will not allow you to modulate a source HDMI signal that has HDCP copy protection enabled (the Blonder Tongue does).
Images of the front and back of the Adtec HDMI to QAM (click the front and back panel for larger images):
The Adtec HDMI-2-QAM first began shipping in November and it’s just now beginning to ramp up to production quantities. The list price on the Adtec HDMI-2-QAM is $7500, making it a price-attractive option at $3750 per channel. There’s more information on the Adtec HDMI-2-QAM product page.
Contemporary Research’s QMOD-HD: Finally, there’s the QMOD-HD from Contemporary Research (product page). Instead of HDMI (which both the Blonder Tongue and Adtec products use), the Contemporary Research QMOD-HD takes in video via a composite high-definition signal (Y-Pb-PR cables) and audio via an optical audio input or analog audio composite (left and right) inputs. And then it modulates that audio and video to QAM. One unit of the QMOD-HD handles a single channel. The advantage to using composite inputs is that the QMOD-HD doesn’t have to worry about handling HDCP encryption that might be present on the HDMI signal. The QMOD-HD does not have any support for passing closed-captioning data.
Here are images of the front and back of the Contemporary Research QMOD-HD:
This is the newest one-box QAM modulation solution that we’ve come across — it started shipping in quantity last week (Feb 2010). The list price for one unit of the CR QMOD-HD is $2450, making it the least expensive per channel of the three options we’ve listed here.
Have any questions about building your own QAM headend for the purposes of recording and searching high-definition television? Drop us an e-mail at enterprise@snapstream.com.
The Sinclair Library at the University of Hawaii at Manoa maintains the only extensive archive of television broadcasts about Hawaii in the state. The library, which for decades relied on videotapes and VCRs, recently switched to a SnapStream Server to ensure the integrity and longevity of its media collection.
The Challenge
In the past, student workers at the library selected broadcasts from published TV listings — and did the taping, quality, and pre-cataloging checks manually, which required hours of work and thousands of videotapes. “We can’t buy Super VHS tape quality anymore. The VCR is obsolete,” explains RuthMarie Quirk, manager of operations at Sinclair Library, who sought a digital solution.
The Solution
After two months of testing, the library in October 2009 deployed a 10-tuner SnapStream Server with 4 terabytes of storage as its exclusive TV-recording device. “SnapStream replaced the prior system completely,” Quirk says. “We save money on supplies [video tapes], and we can search for shows just by looking for the term ‘Hawaii.’ It saves hours of student work each week.”
“The entire process of setting up recordings and processing recorded shows is much easier and faster with SnapStream,” says Emily Albarillo, the digital media specialist.
“Having the shows in a digital format will make them easier to access in the future and also makes viewing much simpler. Storage also takes much less physical space compared to stacks of VHS tapes.”
Current TV and infoMania Install SnapStream, Replace “Messy” DVR Setup
Houston, TX (PRWEB) February 10, 2010 — SnapStream Media, Inc., announced today that infoMania, the half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV, has installed a six-tuner SnapStream Server to record, search, and grab video clips for usage in their weekly commentary. Launched in 2007, the SnapStream Server is a turn-key television search appliance that enables organizations to record and store thousands of hours of television and then search inside those recordings by keywords and phrases.
Each week, the infoMania crew strives to put a humorous spin on media trends, routinely using video clips from TV and the Web to illustrate jokes. When the show debuted in 2008, staffers were doing a lot of extra work to track down footage.
Current now uses SnapStream to make infoMania. SnapStream’s technology allows infoMania to record six shows simultaneously and store hundreds of hours of television. Its producers can then quickly locate the desired footage by keyword. The biggest gain, says global senior broadcast engineer Dave Simon, is the ability to find content fast. “SnapStream was the first system we looked at that had the ability to record and search closed-captioning,” Simon says. “To a television operation like infoMania, that is paramount.”
In addition, Current Media, the corporation that owns and produces infoMania, has installed a second SnapStream Server for media monitoring in their San Francisco office.
“Their selection of SnapStream to not only produce infoMania, but also to monitor media mentions of the company itself, as well as create content for their corporate video and news feeds, speaks volumes about the power and capabilities behind the SnapStream Server solution,” said Rakesh Agrawal, SnapStream’s CEO and Founder.
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.
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.
For customers that are currently using our television search solution, here is a guide to the process. First, locate the video content by searching (or browsing, in this case) within the user interface. If the topic of interest is short, you can use the clipping feature to “trim” down the Closed Caption transcript – when clipping video, SnapStream automatically trims the closed caption transcript as well, so the clip is also searchable. Browse the library for the show or clip, and instead of playing the file, choose “Download Transcript” from the about program page. A dialog will open asking where you want to save the text file of the transcript. The only massaging required is to remove the timestamps, which can be done in any text editor. Copy the text to Wordle.net’s create engine and sit back to admire your work.
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.
(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:
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.
(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.)
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!
The Daily Show and The Colbert Report Choose SnapStream to Monitor and Search Broadcast Television
Houston, December 21, 2009 – SnapStream Media, Inc. announced today that Comedy Central’s hit TV shows “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report,” have selected the company’s TV search solution for locating and packaging high-definition clips from television broadcasts. Launched in 2007, SnapStream Server is a turn-key television search appliance that enables organizations to record and store thousands of hours of television and then search inside those recordings by keywords and phrases.
“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.
SnapStream’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:
click to enlarge image
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:
“Channelized” modulators – this kind of modulator is hard-wired to modulate the audio/video passed into them to a particular channel # (ie to a particular frequency of the RF spectrum). You can’t change the channel number that it outputs on-the-fly.
“Agile” modulators – with an Agile modulator, you can configure, on the fly, what channel you want it to output on. This provides more flexibility with the channels you can output on, but with some sacrifice of quality. Agile modulators are also more expensive (roughly twice as expensive) than “Channelized” modulators.
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 Pricing
You’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.
Conclusion
That’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!
SnapStream 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
SnapStream software has group-model security. This means that users aren’t assigned permissions directly, but rather, they are assigned to groups, and permissions are assigned to everyone in each group. This makes it a lot easier to manage a large group of users- especially when you’re using the LDAP integration feature, which I’ll talk about a bit below.
The permissions configuration page looks like this:
A detailed description of what each permission does is available in our help file.
Predefined groups
Enterprise TV comes preconfigured with several user groups that are designed for some of the typical tasks that you might want to permit or deny.
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!
Schedulers: Basically just like Administrators, except they don’t have access to any server settings. Notably, these users can manage recording priorities. These guys are sort of “in charge” of the recording schedule.
Basic Schedulers: They can submit recording jobs, but they can’t manage recording priorities. New jobs that they submit will come in at the bottom of the priority list, so they can’t accidentally bump someone’s crucial CNN Newsroom recordings for a ball game (or vice versa).
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.
Recorded TV Viewers: They can watch and use recordings, but they can’t watch Live TV.
All of these groups can download files, burn to DVD, create clips and schedule TV Alerts. A detailed breakdown of the permissions for each group can be found in the help file.
How permissions affect the user experience
Users will only see options to which they have access. A Basic Schedulers user, for example, won’t be able to even try to access the Settings menu- they simply won’t see the option.
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.
“Hiding” recordings from users with Folder Security
A client called us recently wanting to know if it was possible to create a series of recordings that would be hidden from most of their users. We weren’t sure what they were planning- and we didn’t ask – but what they were trying to do is pretty simple to accomplish using our Folder Security feature.
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
Our LDAP integration feature allows your users to use their Active Directory or Novell credentials to log in to the server- one less password for them to forget!
Configuring LDAP integration is a three-step process.
1. Consult our recommendations for LDAP integration for some best practices relating to the configuration of Windows on the server.
2. Enable LDAP integration, in Settings=> Advanced Settings=> Security Settings. You’ll need the location of your LDAP server, as well as a username and password who have permission to query other users.
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 log in to Enterprise TV Link, you can feel as secure as logging in to Windows. If you’re using version 4.9.2 of Enterprise TV Link along with our LDAP integration feature, Windows will pass your login information to the SnapStream server, allowing you to bypass the login screen automatically.
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.
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!
