SnapStream Blog

Congress may see the glass half-empty on DTV transition – 09/24/08
After a pair of congressional hearings in recent days where witnesses gave generally favorable reports on the status of the nation’s transition to digital television — still slated for next February 17 — leaders there are still putting out the word that a crisis of misinformation may not be avoided in time. via Beta News

Complaints pour in after digital TV test – 09/23/08
A major problem during a test run in Wilmington, N.C., was the inability of over-the-air viewers to receive new digital signals, according to figures collected after the test. via MSNBC

An alternative to cable chatter: live streams of local stations – 09/22/08
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, the national media’s attention was quickly diverted by the financial crisis and the presidential election last week. But the four local stations in Houston used the Internet to extend their reach, streaming their exhaustive coverage online and drawing viewers around the world by providing an alternative to the chatter on cable news. via NY Times

Watch TV episodes online a week before they air, on Hulu – 09/18/08
NBC is putting many of their premiere episodes on the popular online streaming website, Hulu so that every US resident can watch the online episode a week early. via GeekTonic

Study: DVRs in 27% of TV Homes – 09/15/08
Leichtman Research Group (LRG) said today that 27 percent of TV households in the U.S. have at least one DVR, and 30 percent of those homes have more than one. Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for LRG, is quoted as saying that the number of DVR households in the U.S. basically doubled in the past two years and will double again in the next four years. via NewTeeVee

SnapStream is located in Houston, TX so we have the occasional the tropical storm or hurricane blow through town. This year, after a dodging tropical storm Edouard’s bullet, we took a direct hit last week from Hurricane Ike. Compared to Hurricane Rita (which we wrote about 3 years ago here, here and here), there was a lot less evacuation chaos. It was clear, to me at least, that city and county officials had closely studied the pandemonium that Hurricane Rita created 3 years ago and had built a pretty robust hurricane response plan from that experience.

The SnapStream office is about 40 miles from Galveston, where Ike made landfall, so we didn’t get hit as badly as many, but we did lose power and the office took on some water. So the office was without power for a couple of days, but we were able to restore power to most of the building by Tuesday afternoon. Our Internet wasn’t affected, but to give you an idea of infrastructure damage, take a look this electricity pole down the street from our office. It carries our Internet and electricity:

Holy hovering light pole, Batman!

I’m happy to say, though, that between yesterday and this morning, our hovering electrical pole is no longer hovering. So I’m breathing easier about our office’s power and Internet.

All of our customer-facing services were down for most of Sunday and part of Monday, but they are all back up and running now. The only thing we’re behind on now is technical support (the bulk of our support team was pretty significantly affected by the Hurricane) but we’re going to be working through the weekend to play catch-up.

Thank to everyone for their good wishes.

Here are two posts I’ve made this week over on the SnapStream Enterprise blog related to visualizing television.

Word clouds of the Daily Show and the O’Reilly Report

and

TV coverage of the conventions

For those of you who haven’t ventured over to our Enterprise site there is some exciting stuff going on.

Our TV Search Appliance, which is basically a cross between a DVR and a search engine, is now shipping with upgraded and new features including:

- 24×7 recordings
- archived closed-captioning
- email clips, faster scheduler
- “did you mean..” message when searching within recordings

Check out the Enterprise blog post for more information.

Joost to kill desktop client – 09/05/08
In what is likely to be a major shift in the company strategy, peer-to-peer start-up, Joost is going to stop making its desktop client. The company is going to a browser-only strategy where much of its content is going to be available through a browser-based player. via GigaOM

Survey: DVRs more important than dishwashers, iPods – 09/03/08
When ranked along with other technological gadgets—like a mobile phone, radio, landline, home theater system, game console, and iPod—users put mobile phone first and DVR second. via ArsTechnica

One of the most frequent questions we get is how to choose a graphics for your HTPC. In our system requirements, we state:

Video Card:

nVidia GeForce 2 and above

ATI Graphics Radeon 7500 and above

Others with 16 MB RAM, 3D Acceleration, DirectX 9.0 compatibility

And for HDTV, we specifically recommend:

ATI Radeon 9550 or NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 or Higher

Because new graphics cards are released at such a dizzying pace (if you don’t believe me, take a quick browse through all the Engadget articles about new products from ATI and nVidia), it’s difficult to recommend a particular card. So here are some tips that might help with evaluating a graphics card for your Beyond TV HTPC:
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