Super Bowl commercials air pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while (in between gnawing on buffalo wings and guzzling beer), you could miss the best ones! Based on our selection of favorites from Super Bowl XLVI, we can conclude that SnapStream is made up of dog lovers and Betty White enthusiasts. Who knew?

An estimated 111.3 million people watched this year’s Super Bowl, making it the most watched television show in U.S. History. In case you missed it, we created a 15-second recap of all the greatest ads to catch you up to speed. (Click below.)

Whew, that was a rush of subliminal messaging! We put that together using our very own TV recording and search technology. Now, for the unabridged versions. Please enjoy SnapStream’s handpicked favorites of Super Bowl XLVI, on the house!

1. Doritos: “Man’s Best Friend”
Did you know that Doritos commercials are all user-generated? It’s pretty cool, because both of their ads landed in our top picks. In this one, Doritos are centered as the dog’s mischievous bribe to his owner, in regards to the whereabouts of their missing cat. Sorry, Fluffy.
TV search term: “Cat”

2. Honda: “Matthew’s Day Off”
Matthew Broderick easily falls back into the character of Ferris Bueller, the role of a charming, clever high-school slacker which made him famous at the age of 23. In this spinoff, Broderick plays hooky in a red Honda CR-V instead of the red 1961 Ferrari GT California featured in the original film.
TV search term: “Broderick”

3. Bud Light: “Rescue Dog”
This is Pavlovian conditioning at its finest! A “rescue dog” named Weego is expertly trained to fetch Bud Light bottles whenever somebody says, “here we go.” Get it? “Here, Weego!” Clearly, Weego is prepared to handle the most urgent of emergencies, like needing a beer in your hand stat.
TV search terms: “Here we go”

4. Skechers: “Go Run”
Apparently we swoon over anything that includes a cute dog, and an underdog, at that. We also thought the CGI moonwalking was competitive to Michael Jackon’s. Do you think Mr. Quiggly is an adequate replacement for the former Skechers spokesperson, Kim Kardashian?
TV search term: “Skechers”

5. The Voice: “Vocal Combat”
Dear Betty White, it is about time someone loved you for more than your body! She’s America’s original and most wanted cougar, but with a mix of, “Awww, will you be my grandma?” Hey Betty, SnapStream would love to have you around, knitting sweaters and baking cookies every day.
TV search terms: “The Voice”

6. Volkswagen: “Dog Strikes Back”
At SnapStream, we’re participating in a fitness challenge, so we admire this dog’s aspiration to get in shape. Plus, anything with Star Wars wins us over. Did you think the dog was funnier than the Vader kid? (See last year’s VW Super Bowl commercial.)
TV search terms: “Get up offa that thing”

7. Doritos: “Slingshot Baby”
Another piece of consumer-generated gold for Doritos. Our favorite part is when the baby propels forward in slow-mo. Everything else in the world freezes in that moment of airborne bliss. There’s just nothing like snacking on nacho cheese Doritos with grandma on a sunny day.
TV search terms: “Doritos”

8. Oikos Yogurt: “The Tease”
We were all a big fan of John Stamos on Glee last season, so we were excited to see him make another televised appearance during the Super Bowl. Stamos proudly represents his Greek heritage in the name of protein-packed yogurt. Ladies, would you share your Oikos with John Stamos?
TV search terms: “Oikos”

9. Acura: “Transactions”
We have some serious car buffs in our office, but nothing like Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno. These two comedians are well-known for their automobile enthusiasm and collections. We totally want Leno’s flying squirrel suit to make our daily commutes more like super hero missions.
TV search terms: “Acura”

10. Chevrolet: “Stunt Anthem”
The stunts featured in this spot were totally extreme and off the wall, just like us. Bravo to Chevy for an excellent musical choice to fuel this epic series of stunts. We could also wax nostalgic about the car’s name, Sonic. You know you can play Sonic the Hedgehog on your iPhone?
TV search terms: “Chevy Sonic”

And that concludes our Top 10 Favorite Super Bowl Commercials of 2012. What were your favorites this year, and why?

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

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)

Blowing up the Tube

On Thursday night, Jersey Shore premiered with a blowout of 8.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched series telecast in the history of MTV. Love it or hate it, the Shore is up 62% compared to last year’s debut, according to the Nielson Co.

On the up-and-up, the reality soap’s TV ratings have been progressively climbing, not “creeping,” since it first aired in December 2009 with 1.4 million viewers. The Season 2 opener in July 2010 had 5.2 million people hooked.

While this news is shocking, it’s also not a huge surprise. When you “punch” in a search on SnapStream’s TV Trends (see: Snooki’s face punch), the news results and media coverage match up 100%.

Tidal Wave of Jersey Shore News

All puns aside, the American news media propagates the popularity of Jersey Shore with continuous commentary and constant exposure. Think about it, any singular topic garnering this much attention in the press is going to incite public interest and provoke curiosity. No wonder people can’t get enough.

The shenanigans on Jersey Shore have become the go-to source of pop culture satire—producing a gold mine of interviews, media appearances, spin-offs and talk material that everyone wants to capitalize on.

Snooki Dominates TV Trends

Play around with the graph below. Or visit tvtrends.com to type in your own keywords and see the context of each mention within the closed captioning. (Playback is reserved for SnapStream TV Search users.)

Snooki gets the most references, the most “hits” – isn’t that interesting? She single-handedly outdoes the namesake of the show. If I was her, I’d command higher pay based on the sheer amount of media exposure she’s raking in. So in conclusion, Snooki is the icon and MVP of Jersey Shore.

Have a great Friday. GTL.

For fun, here’s the cast of Jersey Shore on The View:

Hey SnapStream Fans,

Since we’re always tracking the hottest topics on television, we thought we’d whip up a visual word cloud to represent the sizzling trends of the summer. Taking transcript excerpts from peaking keywords on TV Trends from May to present, we made this beautiful conglomerate of headlining news and pop culture.

Just one of the many cool things you can do with the rich information stored in TV Trends–you know it’s open and free for anyone to use, right?

See the original graph that shows the scope of television media coverage.

What I love about working at SnapStream is getting to see what people DO with our software. Here, Daniel Freed shows us a bona fide example of user-generated content. You have to watch the introductory video (below) that he recently put together using SnapStream.

For the past few years, Daniel Freed has been honing his skills at harnessing SnapStream for comedic purposes while working at Current TV’s clip show, infoMania. As the show’s supervising producer, he figured out how to integrate the technology into the clip show’s workflow.

The tagline for infoMania says it all: “Chewing up the week’s media so we can regurgitate it, half-digested, into your mouth.” Mmm, Yummy. But before the pundits can chew out the media, they have to first find the hot trending topics.

During that process, TV Search technology becomes a rich source of inspiration. It’s like giving squishy Play-Doh to a young child and saying “make something.”

In the hands of talented writers, and producers like Daniel, the editable, linkable and clippable substance (of television) can be played with and molded.

But to these creatives’ credit, you won’t find imagination for sale on our products page.

Currently, Daniel is looking for work on other shows, and he says if SnapStream is involved (or even potentially), he would love to continue creating fresh content with this technology. For a knee-slapping good chuckle, check out some more of Daniel’s work, on his page and on Hulu.

We took it to our TV Trends analytics to investigate the uptick of buzz surrounding the iPad, which hits the market tomorrow. The forecast calls for an explosive spike in the media frenzy as users get their hands on experimenting with the highly anticipated Apple tablet. This Wednesday’s episode of Modern Family indicates that it’s going to be a full-on mob scene. Brilliant stroke of product placement, I might add.

Let’s conduct a side-by-side comparison next to other major tech product launches from recent history to see where the iPad stands. If I’ve missed any big debuts, you can plug in keywords yourself on the TV Trends database.

Tech Product Launches in Review

April 2, 2010 – Day before the iPad launches. Media index currently at 146.

January 27, 2010 – Coming of the iPad is announced. Media index shoots to 289.

January 5, 2010 – Google’s Nexus One Phone premieres. Peak of 180.

October 22, 2009 – Launch party for Windows 7. Interest caps at 155.

November 11, 2008 – Google launches Gmail video chat. Reaching 147.

October 22, 2008 – Google’s first Android phone, HTC Dream is released. Index is 77.

Based on our data history, the iPad is positioned to be the overwhelming winner in garnering extensive interest from broadcast media. We will continue to monitor how the world reacts to the iPad post-release.

Click the graph to manipulate the search and view specific channel sources.

Before we started tracking TV trends in October 2008, there are some prime dates from recent memory that would be cool to look at as a frame of reference. These hallmark technology events generate contagious excitement in the media.

July 11, 2008 – Nationwide launch of Apple’s iPhone 3G.

November 19, 2007 – Amazon Kindle launches.

June 29, 2007 – iPhone is introduced into the United States.

January 9, 2007 – Apple’s first iPhone model is announced.

Global DVD sales are projected to decline by 12% this year, compared to 9% in 2009, according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics in Home Media Magazine. Even with Blu-ray expected to rake in $6.5 billion in worldwide sales, it won’t be enough to sustain or regain the industry’s momentum.

No surprise here, with all things digital these days. At SnapStream, we have been early proponents of digital media delivery. The same way iTunes flipped the music industry; DVR and VOD technology are changing the game for Hollywood, which has been slower on the uptake. It’s time to get with the program.

Going digital is right on track with going green; it’s like going paperless. And who has the space for masses of old CDs and DVDs, right? Upload this stuff to your SnapStream archive of however-many-terabytes and eliminate the needless clutter. Reinvent it.

Following this eco trend, every week, I’ll be featuring unique recycled art made out of the nostalgic discs of yesteryear.

If you come up with something cool, send me a pic and I’ll post it! rachel@snapstream.com

At the risk of becoming the official “In memory of VHS!” blog (see here and here, if you don’t know what I’m talking about), here’s another use for that old VCR when you replace it with a SnapStream Server or a SnapStream Mini:

How to make a VHS Video Toaster (on Instructables.com)

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, a lot of our customers drop their VCRs and VHS tapes in favor of recording and searching TV with a SnapStream Server. So we end up seeing a lot of VCRs and VHS cassettes tapes.  A whole lot.  (Here are some photographs if you don’t believe me.)

If any of our customers were worried about what they were going to do with those VCRs and VHS cassette decks, this should give them some ideas:

• They could create a VHS plush pillow / doll
• Pluck the buttons off that VCR and make  ”Play” “Pause” “Rec” VCR buttons (magnetic or pin) (sold out, sorry!)
• Recycle all that VHS magnetic tape to make: drink coasters, clutch purse, or a tote bag

Photographs (all from Etsy.com):