SnapStream’s ‘TV Searcher’ Blog

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:

I removed captioning cues from the transcripts so they didn’t skew the results… I’m talking about things like “[Applause and cheering]” (mostly on the Daily Show ) and “Jon:” and “Bill:”

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.