SnapStream Blog

If you’re at the National Association of Broadcaster’s 2008 tradeshow in Las Vegas next week, be sure and come by our booth in the South Upper Hall (Booth #SU6008). And just to make sure you don’t get lost on the way there, we’ve put together some maps and directions.

See you there!

[cross-posted from the SnapStream Enterprise Blog]

Background: SnapStream’s Enterprise TV Server is currently be used by television stations for “airchecks”. An aircheck is the process by which a television station records and searches past television broadcasts for the purposes of competitive intelligence, research, and FCC compliance. Today, April 1, 2008, SnapStream is announcing an exciting new addition to its television search technologies!

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SnapStream Media Launches Enterprise TV with BearCheck™ Technology
Remove the fear of watching TV by automatically being alerted to bears on the screen.

Houston, April 1, 2008- SnapStream Media, Inc. announced today the addition of the patented BearCheck™ technology to its Enterprise TV Server solution. In addition to recording and searching over 3000 hours of television across 10 tuners, the Enterprise Server can now detect and alert the viewer to the presence of bears on the screen. Handy for organizations that have an unusual aversion to the pictures of bears, BearCheck™ takes all of the worry out of the TV viewing experience.

Available as a free upgrade to all Enterprise TV servers, BearCheck™ may be available for download in the future.

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[cross-posted from the SnapStream Enterprise Blog]

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

Several us from the SnapStream team are here in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow. Stop by and see us — we’re in the Las Vegas Convention Center in the South Upper Hall towards the back… come in the South Upper Hall entrance and follow the wall on the left back to booth SU13310. We’re showing off some new stuff that’s part of our developing enterprise division. Here’s a photo of our booth:

As an added bonus, we have this spacious rest area right next to and across from our booth with four park benches where you can have a seat and rest your feet. And we’re offering up a free high-strength wi-fi connection from our booth. There’s even a restroom half an aisle away! So stop by, see our stuff and take a break.

Late last week, began shipping a small update to Beyond TV… version 4.6.1. Here’s what’s new, from the release notes:

Bug Fixes

- Recordings failing due to, “Could not attach to graph” error are no longer failing.
- Setup wizard now detects sound devices for software encode TV tuner cards.
- TV format settings now correctly being saved as NTSC or PAL in the Web Admin.
- AVerMedia M780 PCI express TV tuner now capable of using both of its onboard tuners simultaneously.
- Serial tuning satellite and set-top-boxes on COM ports higher than 9 can now be done.
- Meta-data no longer lost when copying video files.
- Manual recordings no longer being ended prematurely when the Beyond TV recording scheduler is rebuilt.
- Manual recordings made within the Beyond TV GUI are now being scheduled on the correct channel in cases where duplicate channels exist in a person’s lineup.

Improvements

- Library monitoring and performance improved.
- HDHomeRun (ATSC and QAM support) now supported.
- Serial tuning for DirecTV D11 Model 500 now supported.

The most significant feature in this release is support for unencrypted QAM… What is unencrypted QAM and what does it mean that Beyond TV supports it now?

I’ll elaborate in another blog posting, but in short, it means you can watch and record some of the channels on your cable connection in their pure digital form and, depending on the channel and programming, in high-definition as well. Getting this working does require some specific hardware and to get everything setup, but if this survey is any indication, this won’t deter many of you. Enjoy!

Existing Beyond TV 4 users: Get your free update to Beyond TV 4.6.1

For everyone else, download the free 21-day trial

(and if you’ve tried Beyond TV or the DVD Burning Plug-in before, you’ll get a new 21-day trial period with Beyond TV 4.6.1)

Today, we’re officially launching the Couchville website. Couchville’s purpose is to be a simple TV listings website. In addition to being very usable and fast, there are a bunch of cool things about the site – one of them is the draggable program guide (kind of like Google Maps, but with your program guide) and easy to link to TV show pages for all of you bloggers (for example, a few of my favorite TV shows are Ugly Betty, How I Met Your Mother, (maybe I shouldn’t admit to this one…) Grey’s Anatomy, and, until last week’s episode, Lost).

Check out a few screenshots of Couchville:

Couchville’s draggable program guide

Simple search results

Couchville’s TV show pages are easy to link to

So head on over to Couchville and take the tour or just try the site out.

(other useful links: Press graphics and the FAQ)

Speaking about Couchville in the broader context of our company, SnapStream, Couchville represents a big step for us. We started this company 6 years ago and have spent most of our time focused on PC media center software. We’re best known for our Beyond TV product, a popular PC DVR among techies that does cool things like automatic commercial detection, compress TV shows to a bunch of different formats, stream TV around the home to other networked laptops and desktops, and advanced multi-tuner support. The only problem has been that the audience for PC DVR has been limited to early adopters willing to crack open their PCs and install a TV tuner card. So while we’ve built this really great, usable, simple TV experience, no one other than early adopters have been able to enjoy and appreciate it because of the work involved with setting it up (ie the work with installing a TV tuner card and then connecting your TV signal to your PC). That’s what brought us around to building Couchville. We wanted to build something that would be useful to almost anyone while applying the same usability principles and software development processes we used to build Beyond TV. And after looking at the other folks doing online TV guides, we decided Couchville would be a good place for us to go. We hope you enjoy it!

(and for all of our existing users that might wonder if this means we’re going to stop working on Beyond TV… two words: no way! PC DVR remains our focus and, who knows, at some point you might even see us try to blur the lines between Couchville and Beyond TV.)

Many of you browsing the SnapStream website have come across a new project of ours called Couchville. It’s a simple website for TV listings. A formal announcement will come later this week, but meanwhile, head on over and check it out.

Yesterday, we quietly released a new point release to Beyond TV — version 4.6 — and I feel comfortable saying that this point release has more improvements than any other Beyond TV 4 point release before it. Some of the highlights from the release notes:

• Vista support: Beyond TV now works under Vista, bringing unique SnapStream features like SmartSkip and ShowSqueeze to the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system. Vista compatibility also means that Beyond TV is now 100% compatible with Windows Media Player 11
• Faster search: Our built-in search has been completely re-engineered so that searches by title or keyword (ie actor, actress, description) are more accurate and nearly instantaneous.
• Faster Web Admin: Beyond TV’s built-in web interface is much faster — in some places 10x faster.
• Improved DivX support: DivX playback has been re-written, for those of you who might have had trouble with it, and we’ve also updated DivX playback to version 6.4. As an added bonus, the web admin now supports the DivX Web Player, so your DivX TV shows can easily be streamed over the network.
• Better DVD Burning Support: we worked with our partner to root out some nasty bugs in their DVD burn engine. If you had problems with Beyond TV’s DVD Burning Plug-in before, try it again.
• Bug fixes, bug fixes and more bug fixes: PC DVR can be complex, as some of you who have built your own DVRs know. Beyond TV 4.6 addresses more than 50 other bugs that, we think, make it the most feature rich AND stable and reliable PC DVR out there.

Existing Beyond TV 4 users: Get your free update to Beyond TV 4.6

For everyone else, download the free 21-day trial

(and if you’ve tried Beyond TV or the DVD Burning Plug-in before, you’ll get a new 21-day trial period with Beyond TV 4.6)

Some screenshots:

This search happened really fast because of Beyond TV 4.6 (you’ll just have to take my word for it)

Re-prioritize your recordings in the Web Admin a la Netflix

Beyond TV’s Web Admin now has integrated support for the DivX Web Player

I saw this question today from a user about Vista support in Beyond TV:

I am considering purchasing Beyond TV 4.5, but would really rather wait until you have a version that is compatible with Windows Vista. Do you know when this will be? Is there anyway I can purchase the product now and get a free upgrade when a Vista compatible version is released?

Since Microsoft’s Vista was launched earlier this week, some of you (33.23% percent of you if our survey is correct) may have the same question.

Beyond TV 4.6, the successor to Beyond TV 4.5, will begin shipping very soon now and, among other things, it will contain a broad set of fixes that make Beyond TV fully compatible with Microsoft Vista. And like other point releases, it will be a free upgrade for existing Beyond TV 4.x users. Keep checking back here for a more definitive Beyond TV 4.6 schedule!

In a recent post over in the SnapStream forums, I invited people to add themselves to a map of our community (an idea I borrowed from the excellent byopvr.com website). A couple of days later, more than 100 people have added themselves:

So join in the fun and drop a pin on the map. There are some lonely states out there that need some SnapStream representation.