Every year after the Thanksgiving turkey has been gobbled, I know one thing is for sure. Team SnapStream is bound for the nation’s capital to partake in the expansive Government Video Expo. This year, the event runs December 1 – 2 and will mark our fourth trip to what is known as the largest video production and training event to grace the east coast.

I love traveling to Washington, DC since it’s the thriving epicenter of our government customer base, which includes the U.S. Senate, the Library of Congress and lots of federal organizations under lock and key.  Yet it’s important to note that the applications for TV search are boundless between city, state and federal government, and we have customers across the map with systems ranging in power to meet all levels. The gathering at GV Expo is largely federal, so we will be demonstrating our more powerful systems that can record and archive greater amounts of television over time.

I personally invite all of you “TV Searchers” to our booth (427) to be among the first to test our next generation of TV search technology, which will be fully released in the first half of 2011. I look forward to seeing many of your familiar faces at GV Expo, and happy holidays to all!

As media outlets were buzzing yesterday about midterm elections, we were closely tracking what was mentioned on major television networks here at SnapStream headquarters.

Since we’re a television search and monitoring company, we employ our own  SnapStream Servers to record U.S. national TV (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, CNN and HLN) and provide insights into what is said on U.S. television. On big news days, like an election night, we gather all the closed-captioning data and run the numbers to distinguish the overarching news trends.

From SnapStream’s aggregated television data, clear-cut trends emerge about the nation’s pulse during this pivotal midterm election, which serves as a forecasting indicator of the political climate stirring for the 2012 Presidential Election.

Based on over 60,000 hours of recorded television, freely accessible to anyone at tvtrends.com, we find a heavily evident media focus on the Republican Party and a direct correlation with the outcome of Tuesday’s balloting. As Democrats’ majority in Congress slipped, so did their rate and frequency of national news coverage.

Several approximations are used when computing results, such as how many mentions occur per unique hour. To determine the “hot” and “cold” measure of certain words or topics, we use an equation to calculate a frequency score that’s normalized to the number of hours of TV recorded on any given day.

An overview of keyword frequency across news channels, in descending order:

SnapStream TV Trends aims to provide insights into what is said on U.S. television. Updates occur every half hour and data is shown once the show is complete. To customize your own TV Trend search, visit http://www.snapstream.com/tvtrends.

If you missed the SMPTE conference this year, have no fear. We’re recreating our presentation content just for you! Straight from SnapStream’s file-based workflows session: “Inside the Jokes: TV Search Technology Yields Creative, Comedic Screenwriting.”

This Wednesday, Nov. 3, you’ll catch a glimpse of the HD workflows and long-term storage setup we pioneered at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, along with a behind-the-scenes look at how The Soup searches and clips TV.

HD Workflows & Long-Term Storage Wednesday, November 3 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. EDT. Live Q & A to follow Sign up now at GoToMeeting (it’s free)