SnapStream Blog

Blog posting by Dr. Butler Crittenden, San Francisco PC Users Group:

At San Francisco PC Users Group’s May 2007 meeting one of our members and a long-time user of SnapStream’s products, Judy Gaer, made a great presentation about how to configure and use Beyond TV. She also showed us a little of “beyond tv link,” which facilitates watching recorded shows from any computer in the network. Judy’s family has a fast LAN and everyone in the family is into computers and TV, so keeping track and flexibility are essential to her teen sons and the rest of the family.

A shot of Judy at the computer and some of the attendees.

Judy started by making the basic point that Beyond TV works by a regular cable or analog antenna TV port on the computer, but cable makes the process a lot more sophisticated and capable. SnapStream urges that we use a TV tuner card that has a hardware encoder, as this is much faster and does not drain computer resources. But it will work with software encoding if necessary.

Judy’s method of presentation was very resourceful, as the club’s meeting room temporarily lost its broadband connection. She used streaming media shots of the set-up and use of Beyond TV. Thus we had actual talking videos of her using SnapStream — perhaps even better than an on-line, live performance, as she had time to select and hone what she thought was important and would fit into an hour-long presentation. Of course there were lots of questions, and the level of interest was high. Everyone loved the ability to time-shift and skip through commercials. We also marveled that she can make decisions and changes when on the road, and have new programs at home to watch when she returns.

Judy is also familiar with TIVO, and showed us a little of how the two are quite comparable. She likes Beyond TV as the costs are much lower, and there is no monthly hit like TIVO. In her view, and I think that of most of the rest of us, watching TV is so much better with Beyond TV or TIVO that use of one or the other is almost a necessity. There is simply so much to watch that this tool is just about a necessity for busy people who want to be sure to see what they really want to see and skip the rest. And of course of the several raffle items at the end of the meeting, SnapStream’s Beyond TV was the first to be snapped up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 9:54 am by Rakesh and is filed under Beyond TV, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.