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.

Updated 10/18/2011: added information on Drake’s HDMI to QAM / HD encoder products– the DSE24 and the HDE24.

Updated 7/26/2011: added information on Blonder Tongue’s latest HD encoder product, the HDE-2H-QAM

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.

Drake’s HDE24+MEQ-1000 and Drake DSE24 products (new!): While we haven’t fully tested and reviewed them yet, we recently discovered Drake’s DSE24 and HDE24 products. Read preliminary information here. (Updated 7/26/2011)

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 sales@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.”

View Full Case Study >

We announced Current TV as a SnapStream customer earlier today (press release copied below).

If you’ve never watched Infomania, it’s a look back on the week in media, similar in form to The Soup on E! and Best Week Ever on VH1/MTV (both shows that also run off of our TV search technology).

One of the segments that Infomania does that I’m a big fan of is “Target Women” with Sarah Haskins. Hilarious stuff.

The press release:

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.