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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.
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.
Personally, I was hoping for Colbert building a monster truck out of TiVos and driving over the cars in the executive lot at Viacom.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
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
On the cable side, a CableCard and Ceton InfiniTV 4. Ceton has a 6 tuner card.
As for IPTV, MythTV cannot decode the signal alone however, they can be used with IR blaster connected to a set-top box and MythTV can grab the stream from box sometimes.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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).