Apple fans, today is your day. After over a decade of developing software for Windows, SnapStream is thrilled to announce the all-new Web player for Mac OS X. This is the big cherry on top of Fifth Generation SnapStream, which has brought you scalability with clustering, advanced ShowSqueeze rules, and tons of other new features and upgrades.

With the new release of 5.4.1, Mac users can now experience TV search in their native environments, for the very first time.

SnapStream’s Mac Web player is essentially a custom plug-in that we created to fit within the primary Web interface. It plays back SnapStream’s native MPEG-2 TV recordings in Mozilla Firefox 8 and above, and runs on Mac OS X 10.6.3 and above (which corresponds to anything after Snow Leopard).

The look, feel and functionality is exactly the same as the Web player for PC, which was released in June 2011. From the Web browser, users can point to the SnapStream appliance installed on their LAN and then continue to:

• Schedule TV recordings from the electronic program guide

• Search a vast archive of TV in milliseconds

• Create TV clips

• Play back TV recordings, clips or search results

• Transcode TV content and

• Set up TV Alerts

For those who work exclusively in Mac environments (i.e. educators and broadcasters), SnapStream is very excited to welcome your business and to dazzle you with the powerful capabilities of TV search. Solving TV monitoring problems is what we love to do. Contact us to get started or to schedule your upgrade to version 5. (Current customers must meet the hardware prerequisities in order to upgrade.)

In the spirit of the season, we are delighted to share a special video treat with you. SnapStream’s little helpers ransacked their archive of goodies to produce a year in review through the eyes of TV search. Please pour yourself a glass of eggnog and sing along as we wish you a merry holiday season and a happy new year!

Keep on searching in 2012,
Team SnapStream

Five dollar footlongs, five golden rings and five years of Government Video Expo. Five is indeed a prime number. SnapStream is entering its fifth season of showcasing its TV search technology at GV Expo, the East Coast’s largest pro video and broadcast expo. Will you be there?

If so, be sure to come and find us! This year, we’re smack dab in the middle of all the techie action at booth #523. Exhibits run November 30 and December 1 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in none other than Washington, D.C.

In the context of federal government, SnapStream fits the bill for a variety of purposes, like TV monitoring intelligence and political campaign tracking. At the local level, public information officers leverage SnapStream’s TV search and clipping technology to chronicle their media content. In turn, SnapStream supplies a huge workflow boost, expediting media responsiveness while eliminating the chore of manually scanning recorded broadcasts.

Get in touch if you’d like to schedule a demo with us during GV Expo.

With bounties of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie on our minds this week, it’s easy to lose sight of what Thanksgiving is really all about. Giving thanks.

At SnapStream, we thank our lucky stars we’re in Texas. We will never forget our HTPC roots and humble beginnings as we continue to grow the enterprise-class TV monitoring solution that we provide today. To all of our power users and loyal advocates (that means you, reading this blog!), we greatly appreciate your support.

On our Yammer network (which is thankfully free and awesome), I posted a question to Team SnapStream, “What are you most thankful for this year?” I’ll let the responses speak for themselves. Small disclaimer: Employee avatars have not been altered from their original form.

Aaron Thompson, President
“I’m thankful for the love of my family and to be leading a successful company of awesome people during sketchy economic times.”

Rakesh Agrawal, Founder and CEO
“I’m thankful for my two daughters, my wife and the rest of my family. And I’m thankful for my SnapStream co-workers who I enjoy working with… whether or not I’m in the office.”

Rob Alexander, Software Engineer
“I am thankful for Star Wars Beta and Diablo Beta.”

Zack Price, Manager of Quality Assurance
“I am thankful for working with a good group of friends. I’m also thankful for pictures of cats dressed up in little costumes.”

Adrienne Gonzalez, Platform Engineer and Technical Support Rep
“I am thankful for having a wonderful family, awesome co-workers and finally getting some more rain.”

Chris Wilkerson, IT Manager
“I am thankful for my newly rebuilt family, SSDs making computers faster and for the reboot of IT here at SnapStream.”

Daniel Mee, Technical Support Rep
“The LogMeIn Rescue desktop application.”

Jason Baumeister, Director of Development
“I’m thankful for Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers.”

Josie Munoz, Accountant
“I am thankful for having such a big family. Their love and support has helped keep me strong, especially this year.”

Michael Bui, Technical Support Rep
“Family, work, friends, etc.”

Gerard Monier, Developer in Test
“I’m thankful for intellisense.”

Joel Gabiola, Marketing Director
“I’m thankful for long weekends.”

Elbert Pruitt Jr., Software Test Engineer
“I’m thankful for the good health of my fam.”

Allen Moody, Technical Account Manager
“I am most thankful for my new job at SnapStream. I’m proud to be part of such an amazingly talented team.”

Rachel Eichenbaum, Marketing Campaigns Manager
“I give thanks to Sprint for finally getting the iPhone and to the late Wilson Greatbatch who invented the cardiac pacemaker. “

Dear reader, what are you thankful for? Feel free to share in the comments.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

At some point in your computer-based life, you have probably experienced the wretched agony of software that doesn’t do what you think it should. You’ve probably clicked on a cryptic button, waited entirely too long for a task to complete, or accidentally activated the nuclear option that consigns all of your progress to digital oblivion. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These experiences are so ubiquitous that they have been given an official title, “Computer Rage.” (Yes, it’s in Wikipedia.)

You know it when you feel it. Your heart pounds and your face flushes. You grip your mouse tightly and communicate this displeasure to your machine verbally, regardless of whether or not it has voice recognition software.

Select Google image search results for “Computer Rage”

The much needed relief from your computer woes comes in the form of quality assurance, where we work to ensure that the software does exactly what it’s supposed to do. Within SnapStream, recording TV shows, creating clips, ShowSqueezing episodes, e-mailing TV alerts, and indexing media items are all tasks that have a very clear purpose and pattern of behavior.

They possess multi-faceted progressions of functionality and several layers of complexity which require intricate and multi-leveled testing to guarantee their performance. To safeguard you from Computer Rage, we dream up ways to turn that complexity on its head. We break the software so that you don’t have to.

To test the software from the inside, we attempt to walk a mile in your shoes, one inch at a time. We do this by asking specific “what if” questions:

“What if I attempt to delete a media item while it’s recording?”
“What if my drive fills up with recordings?”
“What if I schedule more recordings than I have tuners for?”

SnapStream has the answers to these questions because a tester has asked them. We then build the answer into the software by deciding what the reasonable expectation of the feature should be. Essentially, this consists of another round of questions. Shall we let the user swim at his own risk or be the heroic lifeguard who ensures the safety and stability of the system? Will the user expect this feature to operate in this manner, or will they wince in agony?

Eventually, we arrive at answers for these questions, and the answers become test cases. We decide that, in a certain case, the software should behave a certain way. As we accumulate test cases, the testing coverage of our software grows and the ability to test the larger picture opens up to us. Design paradigms become more pronounced. We test to ensure that new features behave in ways that are similar to the “personality” that users have come to expect from the software.

Ultimately, it’s this “personality” that makes for a great user experience. When you feel like you know what to expect from software, you feel more comfortable using it. Computer Rage be gone.

SnapStream isn’t lacking for strange traditions, and this one certainly doesn’t break that mold.

In the tradition of singing the blues in Adventures in Babysitting, no one leaves SnapStream without a Dance Central Dance Battle.

Watch the extended clip here, to catch my reference.

And who do we have here, but none other than the man, the legend, the one who takes it to the (PB)MAX, Percy Bell!

For those not in the know, Mr. Max was my office mate, testing cohort and friend of many years who worked at SnapStream until he followed love a few states away three years ago.

Happily, he remembered the good old times and paid us a visit on a recent trip to Houston.

By wearing his SnapStream t-shirt Superman style, he was still able to access the SnapStream lair. We took a tour of the office, highlighting some new additions from the office build-out to the additional racks in the test lab, and then met the some of the new SnapStreamers.

We even took a picture of the two of us in mock fisticuffs…. giving proper homage to all of the late night heated discussions we had about how feature X should work in the software.

Then it was time to say farewell, but as I said, ain’t nobody gets out of this place without a dance-off!

One of the least recognized, yet most powerful features of SnapStream is the ability for our customers to create custom workflows by leveraging the software’s built-in API. The Application Programming Interface acts as a connector between different software programs, allowing them to interact with one another in a seamless fashion.

With SnapStream’s API, the question of “can your software do this?” is now completely open-ended. Developers can create third-party applications that tightly integrate with SnapStream’s TV search technology to accomplish almost anything imaginable. In layman’s terms, SnapStream’s API lets developers do cool things like:

• Create custom search portals
• Automatically create multiple versions of varying bitrate WMV or H.264 files (using our ShowSqueeze technology)
• Integrate with a Google Calendar to automatically schedule recordings on a closed-circuit camera

Densan Consultants, one of SnapStream’s custom code partners, has harnessed SnapStream’s API to create a customer-facing web portal called NewsLink that allows the end user to search amongst TV transcripts (from two SnapStreams), a collection of 50+ federal government news publications, and newswires—all from a single unified interface. Did I mention that the two SnapStream systems are located in two completely different regions of Canada?

View SnapStream in Canada in a larger map

With NewsLink, two SnapStream Appliances are integrated along with EMM print sources, and newswires.

The benefit with this approach is that this customer no longer has three independent tools by which they gather transcripts, news publications and newswire stories. Instead, the end user simply launches his web browser, types in a search term, and voila, instant search results about what’s happening on CBC and Reuters.

TV Search + Print Search + Internet Search + Wire Search

Custom Portal, searching SnapStream Appliance, EMM Print Sources and Newswires.

Perhaps the best part of the API: it’s free to customers! To interface with the API, all you’ll need is a developer who can write C#, and some ideas to implement. If you’d like to learn more about SnapStream’s API, and even look at sample code, just visit http://code.snapstream.com! You can consult with our engineering team as well by contacting us at sales@snapstream.com.

Lots of folks have conspiracy theories about the government, that the government is Big Brother; the government is always watching. Well, I’m here to tell you that government surveillance is a real thing, in one aspect that I know for sure, and that is television monitoring. I can say this with the utmost certainty because SnapStream is in use at hundreds of government organizations throughout the United States, Canada and beyond.

Today, our team is on the ground at GTEC, Canada’s largest government technology exposition. It’s our second year showcasing TV Search at this event thanks to our partner, CBCI Telecom, for prompting us to make it a yearly ritual. At the brand new Ottawa Convention Centre, the government’s IT community will congregate to see the hottest spread of tech offerings, looking for ways to improve operational efficiency while justifying the budget spend, no doubt.

In these aspects, SnapStream is attractive for many public affairs and public information departments who have a vested interest in monitoring televised media on their own terms. Politicians and political parties, too, are a great fit for SnapStream. With SnapStream, you are the keeper of your TV recordings—you have the power to search, clip, archive and transcode your content.

After attending GV Expo last year, I learned that having in-house control over this process is key for government authorities, who need to respond to media requests, dispatch information and maintain an archival of all their press appearances, mentions and activities.

If you’re at GTEC Oct. 18 and 19, come visit SnapStream at booth 123 for a demonstration. The first time you see a TV search in action, you’ll be amazed at how familiar it feels, just like searching the Web. It’s that snappy and easy.

Several of us SnapStreamers enjoy playing America’s game, which involves neither a helmet nor pigskin, nor the trajectory of a wingless bird (cue avian grumbling). We like football and Angry Birds too, but this classic game is poker — No Limit Texas Hold’em to be exact.

You won’t see us on this year’s World Series of Poker broadcasts on ESPN, but about once a month we wear sunglasses at night for our own main event, replete with quotes from the cult movie hit Rounders. Highlights from the first SnapStream Poker Night include:

Realizing we were in trouble when our lead tester Zack shuffled up like a dealer from The Bellagio, Zack sending two summer interns to the rail with a full house (Jacks full of interns), and…Zack earning consecutive first place wins. If the urban term ownage applies here, and it clearly does, then so does rematch!

Texas Hold’em is a game of situations that requires knowledge of hand probability, keen observation, a little math, and a lot of intuition. Many times you don’t know for certain if an opponent’s hand is strong or weak, so you have to lead out with a bet to gain information, often with only a marginal hand yourself. Knowing how much to bet, and when, is key to success at the table.

If this game of calculated risk sounds a bit like a metaphor for business strategy or investing, then you’re onto something. Rewind to the mid-70s, when part of the money raised for a start up named Microsoft came from the founder’s poker winnings at Harvard. Here’s a passage from Bill Gates’s prophetic 1995 book, The Road Ahead:

“In poker, a player collects different pieces of information—who’s betting boldly, what cards are showing, what this guy’s pattern of betting and bluffing is—and then crunches all that data together to devise a plan for his own hand. I got pretty good at this kind of information processing.”

Pretty good indeed (he says, 16 years later, from a PC running Win7 Pro)… Evidently, the kind of analysis Gates uses to arrive at a poker hand strategy is common to many professions requiring the ability to size up a situation. As an example from software testing, here are a few vectors from our lead tester’s playbook on preparing to test at SnapStream:

“What is the scope of this code check-in, what are the requirements and expectations, what are the boundary cases, performance considerations, security concerns etc? What’s the plan of attack?”

Tackling these and other fundamental questions sharpens our game by clarifying the situation and a course of action. We then play against the software to help strengthen it for our customers. If that sounds like fun, it is!

On that note, the SnapStream Series of Poker continues at the end the month, near Halloween. No doubt a few well-disguised A-games will be lurking at the table, behind some very unusual poker faces. May your full house be pleasantly haunted this autumn, and remember:

“You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle… but you can’t win much either.” – Mike McDermott (Matt Damon, Rounders)