SnapStream’s ‘TV Searcher’ Blog

Today, we’re launching SnapStream TV Trends (http://www.snapstream.com/tvtrends/), a tool that allows you to track trends on national television here in the United States.

Enter a couple of keywords (up to 5) into TV Trends and you’ll get a graph showing you the relative frequency of mentions of those words on mostly-news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN.

Here’s an example comparing mentions of Twitter and Facebook on national TV:

(click the “SnapStream TV Trends” link on top to see a larger more detailed version the graph)

So you can see Facebook was generally getting more mentions on national TV until February or March of this year when Twitter started taking over… and since then Twitter has consistently received more TV airtime than Facebook. And what about that big spike for twitter in mid-April? That was the whole Twitter/Oprah/Ashton Kutcher thing.

Here’s a comparison of mentions of tech giants Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo on traditional TV:

And the word ‘yes’ vs. the word ‘no’?

TV Trends graphs can be embedded into your website or blog using the simple embed code underneath the graph or you can link to graphs by just copying the URL from your browser’s address bar. And on the TV Trends site, you can view excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and you can filter the results by network (chart mentions of “Obama” on Fox or MSNBC) and by genre (show me mentions of “Obama” on comedy programs).

Another feature of TV Trends are hot and cold words… These are the top ascending (hot) and descending (cold) words on national television. For example, as I write this blog post, the top rising terms, the top hot words, are “north korea” and “two american journalists” — references to the two American journalists that have been sentenced to hard labor in North Korea.

While many types of analytics are available for other media (see Compete, Alexa, Trendrr) until now, there hasn’t been a way to track and analyze what’s being said on traditional television.  TV Trends attempts to offer some insight into the world of traditional “offline” television…

And behind the scenes, SnapStream TV Trends is powered by SnapStream’s TV recording and search technology. SnapStream’s TV search technology allows organizations to record LOTS of TV and then search inside those TV shows for mentions of their city government, “breaking news” on a competitive local TV station, an elected official, a natural disaster or anything else anyone might be looking for on TV. You can think of it like a cross between a DVR on steroids (one SnapStream Server can record 10 TV shows at a time) and a search engine. This technology powers TV trends and it’s behind TV monitoring at organizations such as E!’s The Soup, XM Radio, NBC, Current TV, the U.S. Senate, University of Southern California, University of Texas, City of Austin, and the City of Chicago. If you use a clipping service or, worse, a bank of VCRs or DVRs, to keep track of what’s being said on TV about your brand or whatever, you should give SnapStream Enterprise a look.

So try out TV Trends and let us know what you think! Post your questions and feedback here in the comments or on twitter (we’re at @snapstream).

I was deep in marketing-land on Thursday (also known as “writing a case study”), when I heard about the US Airways plane that crash-landed in the Hudson. I grew up in Houston, but lived in NYC for 5 years and moved back last year. I still have lots of friends there…so when I hear news like that coming out of NY I still feel like it’s My News and it feels personal. Within minutes, my boss showed me that rescue picture that Janis Krums took from the ferry and posted to Twitter. I was really amazed by how quickly that picture got out. I watched as the number of “views” went from the dozens to the thousands. It was posted and cross-posted on lots of different blogs as the page views overloaded the Twitter server. Twitter is an amazing thing. I posted it to my Facebook page; I had friends in NY who learned of the plane crash from my Facebook post. Incredible.

A few minutes later, I ran across an article on Silicon Alley Insider, “U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work.” I was astonished at how quickly that all happened. I know that sounds cliche…but not just the news of the plane crash – but also how quickly the photo some random guy took from his iPhone got thousands upon thousands of views within minutes; according to Dan Frommer, he was interviewed live on MSNBC just 34 minutes after he posted that photo to Twitter. Pretty cool. It got me thinking about how much technology has changed the way journalists cover the news.

Which got me wondering over the weekend, if I were a video blogger, how quickly could I get up a story about that plane crash? Here in the SnapStream office, we record most of the National news programs for our own interest and example purposes, and we’ve got alerts that are set up for “breaking news” (read more about that here). I went to my email alerts, did a quick search through Gmail for “Plane Crash” and got several results. I clicked right through to the program through the link in my alert:

In the end, though, I was just fascinated by how quickly that news spread, and how new technologies like Twitter and SnapStream can help journalists keep track of an unfolding event. Pretty cool.

Here’s the clip of the TV broadcast my “breaking news” alert linked me to.

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.

Jeff Jarvis wrote a blog post last week about how he thought the word “actually” was overused on television. Here’s the post (he lost a bunch of posts and hasn’t restored them all):

Actually is the new ‘y’know’
July 19th, 2008, by Jeff Jarvis

The most overused and unnecessary word on broadcast is “actually.” Start counting how many times it is used by TV people and you’ll hate me for driving you nuts.

While I’m kvetching, why do TV people introduce a panel of three people and then say, “Mr. Jones, let me start with you.” Just start with him: ask your question. Why this need to warn Mr. Jones?

Our TV search appliance is used by a number of journalism schools for content analysis (like Emerson College and GWU, so this got me thinking about how we might try and use our product to measure Jeff’s assertion about the word actually.

So here’s what I did. I took one week of national TV recordings that we had made on a SnapStream Enterprise TV Server and I did some ad-hoc analysis (remember, I’m not expert on content analysis!) on how frequently the word ‘actually’ appeared by series and by network.

Here are the 20 shows that use the word ‘actually’ the most:

And here are the 20 shows that use the word ‘actually’ the least:

And here’s a summary of the the word ‘actually’ by network:

Here’s all the data if you want to dig deeper.

So at the higher end, offending shows are using the word ‘actually’ between once every 10 minutes to once every 3 minutes. Since I’m not a content analysis expert, what other trends can you draw? How could the test be improved?