Slashdot Mirror
Domain: snapstream.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to snapstream.com.
Stories · 12
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Stephen Colbert and the Monster Truck of Tivos
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Lee Hutchinson writes at Ars Technica that when you're picking out a DVR for your home, there's a pretty short list of candidates — TiVo has its new 6-tuner DVRs, or you can get something from your cable provider, or you can roll your own. But SnapStream makes a line of 30+ channel DVRs that can record dozens of TV shows simultaneously. Its products are the monster trucks of the DVR world, used by popular shows like The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and The Soup. A SnapStream cluster can repackage, transcode, and distribute content for re-use — functionality you won't find on a consumer-grade DVR. 'Being able to record, say, all of the news channels was something companies were interested in,' says Aaron Thompson, SnapStream's president. 'The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and so on all use it to record a bunch of stuff, find what they want to make fun of, and quickly get it into their editing bays to get it on air.' Prior to SnapStream, the big media companies were using isolated DVRs to record all the different television channels and shows like The Colbert Report had armies of interns to watch and catalog all the recorded TV, but SnapStream can search the entire recorded library for video based on keywords in the closed captions. 'We bring some of the power of 'new media,' the ability to search, copy and paste, and e-mail clips, to the old media of television for organizations,' says Rakesh Agrawal . 'You weren't able to search television before, but now you can. Now you can pinpoint stuff and you can hold people accountable and move at the same speed at which media works in the online world.'" -
Building the Godzilla of PVRs
EvolvedHumanoid writes "In a blog post, Percy Bell of SnapStream Media details how he built 'Godzilla', an 11-tuner PVR machine with HDTV support using off-the-shelf components. At $4284.90, the end result sports 1TB storage for recorded content and has to be one of the coolest PVRs ever built." -
Windows Media Center Edition vs. The World
sam_christ writes "An article in today's Investor's Business Daily (Google cache) and an article by TV industry pundit/predictions-huckster Philip Swann say the same thing: that Microsoft's Media Center Edition will be a big flop in 2005. Meanwhile, from what I can tell much more powerful alternatives to Microsoft's MCE bloatware are thriving: commercial products like Snapstream (see their 6-tuner Medusa PVR built for about $1200), Showshifter and open-source freeware like Mediaportal and MythTV. From what I've read about Microsoft MCE and all of its DRM and content restrictions, I have to agree with both of these articles." -
Windows Media Center Edition vs. The World
sam_christ writes "An article in today's Investor's Business Daily (Google cache) and an article by TV industry pundit/predictions-huckster Philip Swann say the same thing: that Microsoft's Media Center Edition will be a big flop in 2005. Meanwhile, from what I can tell much more powerful alternatives to Microsoft's MCE bloatware are thriving: commercial products like Snapstream (see their 6-tuner Medusa PVR built for about $1200), Showshifter and open-source freeware like Mediaportal and MythTV. From what I've read about Microsoft MCE and all of its DRM and content restrictions, I have to agree with both of these articles." -
Latest SnapStream PVR App Reviewed
martensitic writes "Yahoo! posted this positive AP review of the newest version of a third-party PC app designed to compete with TiVo and Microsoft's Media Center. SnapStream 's 'Beyond TV 3' (sounds like something Fox would produce) allows streaming to standard web browsers for watching on other computers in your home, and promotes automatic commercial break recognition that has been downplayed in other products. (Previously mentioned here.)" -
Latest SnapStream PVR App Reviewed
martensitic writes "Yahoo! posted this positive AP review of the newest version of a third-party PC app designed to compete with TiVo and Microsoft's Media Center. SnapStream 's 'Beyond TV 3' (sounds like something Fox would produce) allows streaming to standard web browsers for watching on other computers in your home, and promotes automatic commercial break recognition that has been downplayed in other products. (Previously mentioned here.)" -
The State of Automated Commercial Skipping
iskqy writes "Even though attention to commerical skipping has gone down since the motion picture studios sued replaytv for it, I've noticed that it appears to be alive and well in some PVR products on the market. ReplayTV PVRs have it (though different from what they got sued for) in what they call Show|Nav (what a terrible feature name!) and SnapStream's Beyond TV has it in a feature they call SmartSkip. In both cases, the user has to press a button to automagically skip a commercial (vs. the original ReplayTV feature which skipped them without any user intervention) but it's basically the same thing. ReplayTV plays down commercial skipping ("jump forward and back between scenes in a show") but SnapStream is more open about the feature ("Skip commercials and other parts of TV shows"). " -
Microsoft/HP to Market Crippled Entertainment PCs
gustywinds writes "CNet is reporting that Microsoft and HP recently announced the details on their Media Center PCs that will be coming out this Christmas season (this used to be called 'Freestyle'). The big story is that these PCs will have anti-copying mechanisms built-in to them -- ie can't burn recorded TV shows to DVD, or even copy and play them back on other PCs. And they are going to be expensive... $1500 for the starter box. Sounds like this thing is going to be DOA. Lots of other PC-based TV recording products that aren't restrictive when it comes to copying stuff goes... Snapstream, WinDVR... And, of course, Hauppauge, nVidia and ATi have products too but their software is pretty lacking..." -
Turning the PC into a Digital Video Recorder
gearfix2 writes "The NYTimes ran this story in today's paper about how to turn the PC into a personal video recorder (a la TiVo)... It's got pretty thorough coverage of PC-based hardware with the conclusion "the TiVo outshines the PC-based systems by being easier to use and by offering more built-in intelligence." Conspicuously absent are El Gato's EyeTV for the mac and SnapStream's Personal Video Station... Anyways, the real question is whether PC PVR will *ever* get there. No one does it quite right yet..." -
The Napsterization of TV
Lefty writes "This article in today's Boston Globe talks about the napsterization of TV shows and how the PC as a media server is going to make it happen. Burning TV shows to CD/DVD, e-mailing your friends TV shows, streaming TV over the Internet -- all things the dedicated set-top boxes can't do... The article talks about Snapstream, a PVR competitor to Moxi and ReplayTV, that runs on the PC and has media server capabilities. from the article: "Already you can find a great deal of pirated video material online. If SnapStream gets installed on millions of PCs, there'll be plenty more. And the TV moguls will find themselves knee deep in the digital acid bath."" -
Thomson's Vision: Smart Cards For Everything
ideaspin writes: "Thomson Multimedia is pushing the adoption of its smart card technology (SmartRight) in all kinds of devices ranging from TVs to PCs and set-top boxes -- basically, anything that might play digital media. Information Week has an article about it as does Webnoize(subscription only). This doesn't smell like something that would survive on the PC and consumers aren't going to be thrilled about the restrictions that such technology will bring -- no recording, limited archivability, no sharing and additional hardware for every viewing device. Interesting thing is that they are trying to convince the government to require the computer industry to adopt such a standard. Along with the copy protection schemes built into portable media and hard drives, this is one of the many ways that they are trying to lock down 'rogue' PC devices." -
Sonicblue Acquires ReplayTV
rakeshagrawal writes: "This article reports that Sonicblue is buying ReplayTV. It's an interesting step in Sonicblue's transformation. They have quite an array of media devices/software items ranging from audio products, web tablets, home networking and now video. And as for ReplayTV and the PVR industry it means that TiVo may may have even less competition now ... WebNoize has another very interesting article on the acquisition and SonicBlue's overall strategy, but it's a subscriber-only thing :(" (Quick note to WebNoize -- wouldn't you like more people to read this?)