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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.'"
Sure, it's an advertisement (or slashvertisement, *groan*) ... but this one is highly relevant.
To someone.
Somewhere.
Maybe.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Now I can record even more TV that I'll never get around to watching. Technology is great and progress is divine.
FTS: "the monster trucks of the DVR world"
But the title is "Monster Truck of Tivos"
Why? Why do we have to use Tivo as a synonym for DVR, can't we just say DVR?
With digital TV providing multiple TV channels per MUX, it is a lot cheaper to buy the amount of cards necessary to receive everything. In most cases you can even decrypt a whole bunch of channels with just one subscription card. You will not necessarily get all the fancy features that SnapStream provides, but it is a very affordable solution. HTS-TVHeadend can handle some of the practical details like recording each program into a separate file.
Getting enough disk bandwidth might be a challenge of course, but you need a lot of drives anyway to handle the space requirements. Transcoding is not really practical with that many channels unless you do like SnapStream and use dedicated co-processors per channel.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
That's not really an apt comparison, because despite their name... monster trucks bear little resemblance to real trucks. They're prima donna performers, capable of little else other than looking good and making a lot of noise.
That will set you back to the tune of about $223,500 (enter some fake info for the details). Or it looks like you can lease 30 tuners for about $5,000/month.
Think I'll be sticking with my Moxi.
Oh hey, you're the guy.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That's a bit harsh, but I don't entirely disagree. My satellite services over the past few years have included their own DVR which has always worked fine and can record multiple shows (maybe 4 idk) at the same time. I'm sure that has never actually happened though, since there is still never anything on I actually care about. Without a DVR however, I wouldn't bother paying for a TV service at all.
Actually TV watching is increasing in all demographic groups.
Quite happy with my MythTV box thanks. It does a lot more than any commercial product.
Since as I recall U-verse centrally packages ALL television now to allow the back in time DVR feature, wouldn't the prudent thing be for AT&T (even though I dislike them) to offer a commercial product. $5k / month and all they need to do is drop a few U-Verse boxes with unlimited channel lineup packages and maybe a custom workstation that can pull and transcode. I think Time Warner has a similar feature as well to jump back to missed shows.
The bigger joke here, is with all of their investment in infrastructure, that within the RTVF industry, each player doesn't already have a centralized system to control all of their content digitally that they lease out to each other at uncompressed 1080P & 4k. No wonder catching up to Netflix has been such an ordeal.
cable systems have limits / very a lot system to system.
http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2013-08/outdated-cablecards-limit-tivo-roamio-tuning-capabilities/
This submission is a lot less interesting than the title led me to believe.
#DeleteChrome
TV is increasingly complained about by the irrelevant and impotent.
I tried TiVo out. I wanted it to do one thing: Allow me to record a single channel N for one hour beginning at HH:MM.
It can't do it.
Instead, TiVo insists that I connect to a phone line or an internet connection. It insists on downloading program schedules, and it wants to force me to select what program I want to record. It's got one job, and that is to record the channel I tell it to for a certain amount of time beginning at a certain time, and it can't do that.
I sent it back.
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2009/12/houstons-snapstream-to-power-the-daily-show-colbert-report/
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
That's pretty cool device too bad it isn't in the realm of average people. How much more efficient media could be consumed.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
We've been doing this since 2007 (digitally) at the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales. We have a licence to keep for the nation any broadcast TV that we recieve that meets our collection policy. We've been doing it on SVHS (and earlier technology) for decades before. We probably have an order of magnitude fewer channels than they have (UK Freeview - 50 TV & 24 radio) but scaling up the number of channels we keep in the buffer (two weeks) before programme selection wouldn't come close to the pricing mentioned in some of the comments here. We keep the full MPEG-TS as transmitted (so can use the raster subtitle streams if necessary) and ingest them into our Fedora-commons digital repository. We're moving to a version that OCRs the subtitles for improved resource discovery - at the moment we only use the EPG which we convert to our own metadata standard.
We use a commercial system, Imagen from Cambridge Imaging Systems, to capture and select, then our own workflows for technical characterisation, metadata transformation and ingest, but you could use MythTV or some other to buffer two weeks of the entire UK terrestrial output for a lot less than is being mentioned here. We will have a youtube-like interface (but with transcription searches from the subtitles) to search the tens of thousands of recordings that we hold, and it will incorporate digitised material from our own unique collections of film and video.
I'm sure that the BBC or other similar national broadcasters have monsterous systems that eclispe ours or The Colbert Show's - the system we're using was originally designed as one massive PVR for UK universities to try to save resources and share recordings amongst campus users rather than have each student download each progamme to their dorms (and uni storage).
Does it really take that level of infrastructure?
I would think it would be embarrassingly easy to find people saying stupid things on the news these days without a lot of searching, and then just comment on the stupid things you find. It's sort of analogous to looking for a needle in a needle factory.
would get back into the consumer space.. (they quit updating/developing beyondtv two years ago.. although the old version is still for sale.. who knows for how long it will be and how long its listings will continue...)
with sage getting bought and and essentially shut down (no more products for sale).......
and the shit microsoft pulled with media center -- pulled from win8 then peddled as an extra cost addon -- an extra cost home user addon to the more expensive business-oriented 'pro' edition (only) of windows ... the tv recording media center/dvr marked needs a viable alternative... freebies like myth will never get full cablecard access due to licensing costs but a commercial one would and could.. so we need an alternative to windows media center and beyondtv could have been it..
Hey! It's hard to watch TV while staring out the window to guard against anyone stepping on your lawn ...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Too bad this company stopped doing consumer products like BeyondTV. I wonder what are good ones these days.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I don't know why anyone would have that problem.. At the end of the Great War, I shipped back plenty of barbed wire and landmines. More than enough to border my property. It was very useful during the Great Depression.
There have been a few stray animals that have caused problem, but no damned kids on the lawn.
Them youngins don't know how to protect their lawns.
I'll go back to watching those funny kids, Larry, Moe, and Curly. Great fun they are.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
>"Stephen Colbert and the Monster Truck of Tivos"
A SnapStream is not a TiVo, it is a DVR. So you can call it "Stephen Colbert and the Monster Truck of DVRs".
And the CORRECT term is even in the article that you were apparently trying to quote:
"Houston-based SnapStream makes a line of DVRs that scale to truly silly sizesâ"its products are the monster trucks of the DVR world."
So why the hell edit it to make it wrong and confusing?
One more job lost...
Really is absurd that you need equipment to do this task in the first place.
Do those shows just not know how to build a DVR computer? My gaming PC took about $150 in additions to make it an HD-capable, DTV-capable, satellite-capable, cable-capable DVR that can record 900 hours of video. I could have gone dual or quad tuners for not a whole lot more. Then the end result is an actual file, not some digital content floating around in a proprietary box with all custom parts and a custom OS. Take that, all DVRs everywhere.
The tv stations have all the content stored, they then stream it and we have to record it all again to watch it? A better model would be that the stations or producers of the shows just allow you to stream it from them, either free with ads or paid with no ads. How long will it be before the stations get this? This is why I don't watch tv.
Now I can record even more TV that I'll never get around to watching. Technology is great and progress is divine.
Ha ha, but seriously....
Letting the automation pull the the needles out of the hundreds-of-channels vast wasteland haystack is a classic example of using automation to do the drudgery, leaving you to do the interesting stuff.
There's two hundred channels of crud and 20 minutes per day of stuff of interest? Let the computer watch the junk sieve out the jems for you. That way you don't need to be rich enough to hire an army of interns to do the same.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Back in the day Snapstream made an awesome consumer product, Beyond Tv, which was exactly what MCE should have been. The product and their customer support was a dream. It allowed multiple tuners, was relatively lightweight, and I even bought their networked streaming Link product. Being internet professionals us forum posters complained that we paid for a product which didn't have every single feature we wanted. I think this contributed to Snapstream deciding us consumers were never appreciative and businesses were a lot easier and more lucrative. Ultimately I miss their consumer products, I could honestly still use them, and I think I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
"Welcome to http://goat.cx/
This domain been suspended, please use the Registration URL link to contact your registrar
Error Connecting To Whois Server."
The domain has been suspended/parked for a while. I don't know why you want us to see that. Don't bother changing to goat.se, the asshole's long gone, replaced with some goat info. Yes, it's domain parked too.
When you're picking out a DVR for your home, it's probably still 1996.
I don't have data to support this presently, but I'd suspect this is because no one has to watch TV on TV anymore.
I can see there's a specialised need for multi-channel recording but can't understand how there can be a domestic need to record more than one at a time - are there people who honestly enjoy so much of the current programming that there's things on more than one channel for any time slot that they're interested in?
... at the same time, then you have a mayor mental problem and should consult a psychiatrist.
I can see recording 2 shows at the same time, while watching a 3rd. Sometimes good shows air at the same time. But 12 at the same time?? You have to have a very serious addiction to the TV if you need a 12 channel DVR.