Today is the day! At the 2011 International Broadcasting Convention, Europe’s largest professional broadcast show, SnapStream will premiere its best-of-breed TV recording and search capabilities on the world’s stage, Hall 6, Stand 6.A06. This is a highly anticipated moment by many, and I mean MANY. Every day, we receive messages from organizations all over the world, looking to enlist SnapStream to solve their TV monitoring problems (which include costly clipping services and traditional, subscription-based media monitoring services).

The international distinction, or technical hurdle, has long been the varying digital broadcast standards native to each country. For example: In the U.S. and Canada, it’s ATSC. In Europe, it’s DVB-T and PAL. We soon discovered it wasn’t going to be a simple migration to transfer the complexity of SnapStream’s architecture over to these foreign standards.

Luckily, our engineers are incredibly smart people! So it’s in due course that our team is now on the ground in Amsterdam, showcasing the first prototype of our European TV monitoring technology. The new SnapStream adds support for PAL and early support for DVB-T. Subtitles and teletext searching will be incorporated into a subsequent release.

If you’re at the Amsterdam RAI, Septemeber 9 – 13, you’ll see up close how SnapStream enables organizations to record, log and search traditional TV (terrestrial, cable or satellite), all over the LAN.

Today, our powerful TV monitoring platform is used by hundreds of broadcasters, production studios, educators and governments across North America. Now, European organizations will soon be able to leverage SnapStream’s robust capabilities:

- Record large amounts of TV, from 4 channels to 50 channels or… more!
- Archive an unlimited amount of TV shows with expandable storage
- Access TV over the LAN from any LAN connected PC with a web browser
- Perform real-time keyword searches of subtitles (where available)
- Easily create, download and e-mail TV clips
- Receive TV e-mail alerts of specific mentions
- Watch TV from any PC on the network
- Transcode TV files seamlessly and quickly to WMV and H.264 formats

If you’re not going to be at the show, contact us to set up a Web demo and to glean additional information.

Join us for our web seminar (June 23rd, 2:30 PM CST) specific for the communications offices of elected officials, and learn how your office can leverage TV content to interact with your constituents in a more responsive and efficient way.

Many government officials across the country are currently using SnapStream to aid them with television media monitoring. They are able to simultaneously record news channels (including CSPAN, CNN, Fox News, etc.) plus any internal cable TV feeds 24×7 and then search the closed-caption text for keyword mentions to keep track of legislation issues and media appearances. And with the relaxation of the Franking Rules this past January, they can now take advantage of SnapStream’s clipping feature to increase their online video presence by uploading video clips to their YouTube, House or Senate page.

SnapStream is currently used in the offices of elected officials to:

• Track TV mentions of officials, staff and legislation
• Create clips for online distribution
• Distribute TV using the existing office network
• Record & search thousands of hours of TV
• Eliminate manual search of video tapes and clipping fees

When compared to TiVos/DVRs, VCRs or clipping services, SnapStream provides dramatic improvements in cost and convenience.

Event: How Elected Officials Enhance their Media Monitoring Efforts
When: June 23rd, 2009; 2:30 CST

Sign me Up!

Tired of managing VCRs or TiVo’s? Looking for a better way to monitor press coverage? Register for our special web seminar geared towards Public Information Officers in government. The City of Austin will be the guest speaker and will be discussing how they were able to cut the costs associated with maintaining 12 unreliable VCRs by moving to a more cost-effective, unified solution – the SnapStream Server.

The City of Austin will discuss how they:

• Digitally record and archive all TV coverage
• Allow cross-departmental access to those recordings
• Instantaneously pinpoint mentions of interest
• Create clips from full recordings
• Use past coverage for training purposes
• Monitor newscasts
• Create daily media reports
• Respond appropriately and quickly to TV coverage

Event: Learn how the City of Austin monitors TV
When: June 2nd, 2009; 2:30 CST
Guest Speaker: City of Austin

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SnapStream will be at NAB this year again, to demonstrate our new products and features. Come by and see us at our booth, South Upper Hall #SU6105 (Map)

The new products and features we’ll be demonstrating:

• QAM/ATSC Support: Record, search and clip QAM and ATSC broadcasts.
• Email Clip: Create a clip and email it using the Viewscape or Admin interface.
• Real-Time Search: Search for mentions of interest as they are being recorded.
• SnapStream Mini TV Search Appliance: For smaller organizations that stand to gain from searching television, but don’t need the full functionality of the SnapStream Server.

NABShow
April 17–23, 2009 • Las Vegas, NV
The NAB Show has evolved over the last eight decades to continually lead this ever-changing industry. And while the solutions at your fingertips have changed to keep pace with consumer lifestyles, habits and technologies, your aspirations to produce and deliver memorable content have remained consistent. From conception through distribution, the NAB Show has proudly served as the incubator for excellence – helping to breathe life into content everywhere.
www.nabshow.com

Governments use SnapStream to monitor television for a variety of reasons. In most government uses, it’s the PIOs who are using SnapStream to keep themselves, and thus the public, informed about issues that relate to the governing of the city and the reaction of the media to those issues. It is the responsibility of the PIOs to track events, issues and people relating to their specific department/agency.

So as the PIO, you are responsible for being spokespeople for the City and for coordinating all other communications activities with the media and citizens. Being able to respond quickly to coverage relating to your city is key. SnapStream servers allow you to do just that. Using the TV search function, you can find whatever you’re looking for immediately, without having to scan through hours of media coverage manually.

The SnapStream Servers also give you the ability to edit out just the segment you need and then email or burn that clip to DVD. You can even have an email alert sent to you notifying you of mentions of whatever it is you’re looking for. Read more about SnapStream email alerts.

Do More With Less. With SnapStream, administrators can easily control who has access to the server and what features they have access to. For a lot of government groups, for example, access to media recordings is limited to one centralized group, and so those departments that have access are often overloaded with requests for copies of news coverage – which is both time-consuming and expensive.

By using SnapStream Servers to streamline your media monitoring efforts, you can:

• Improve reaction time to media coverage
• Eliminate costs of VHS tapes and shipping
• Give access to multiple departments; reducing unnecessary strain on one centralized group

Recently, The City of Austin was a guest speaker for a webinar we held on the benefits of using SnapStream for government media monitoring. Reyne Telles, the Media Relation Manager at “Corporate PIO” says that as the City of Austin has been on a hiring freeze and his team has been short-staffed, SnapStream has enabled his group to do more with less. Read more about how the City of Austin is using SnapStream.

In a webinar for city governments that we’re hosting today (it’s at 2:30pm central, you can register here), one of our customers, the City of Austin’s public information office (PIO), will be talking about how they use SnapStream in their city to track and quickly respond to television coverage.

Here’s an overview of the City of Austin’s story before today’s webinar:
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Stratatech is an IT and consulting company that offers analysis of television marketing efforts as one of their services. To do this, Stratatech provides clients with detailed reports that measure and evaluate on-air mentions versus cost for specific televised sporting events.
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The Las Vegas Convention center is huge at 3.2 million square feet and while at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, SnapStream only occupies 100 sq. ft. of that space. And based on feedback from visitors last year, we know that the SnapStream booth was hard to find.

Hopefully this year we’re easier to find simply because we’re not as far back in the South Upper Hall as we were last year (many thanks to our contact at the NAB, Joy Lindsey!):

But, we still wanted to make it easier for you to find us so here are some maps and directions.

Directions to SnapStream at NAB2008:

1. Get to the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (veterans of the Las Vegas Convention Center will know that this is on one end of the convention center, furthest away from the Hilton and the North Hall)

2. Take the escalator up to the South Upper Hall

3. Walk down the main corridor of the South Upper Hall (you’ll pass massive booths from companies like Sony and Motorola)

4. When you see the Ross Video booth, hang a left.

5. You’ll see us on a corner to your right — our booth number is #SU6008.

See you at NAB!

I’ve already had several people ask me if we’ll be at NAB 2008 — the answer is, yes! We’ll be in the South Upper Hall, not too far from the entrance. Our booth number is South Upper Hall 6008 (SU6008).

If you’d like to schedule a meeting, drop us an e-mail at enterprise at snapstream dot com, or just stop on by. Several members of our team will be there and we’ll be showing off the latest version of SnapStream Enterprise.

Hope to see you there!

Update: Here’s are directions on how to get to our booth at NAB