The late Douglas Adams once wrote that dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, saving the trouble of washing them yourself, and VCRs watched tedious television for you, saving you from the same fate. He would have loved the SnapStream Television Search Appliance, a digital video recorder that can record up to ten television channels simultaneously and store up to 2,300 hours of programming on 1.5 terabytes of storage (or more).

Now, multi-channel digital video recorders are nothing new—I once worked for a company that assembled 16 and even some 32-channel recorders from standard PC parts and software from South Korea—but traditionally such beasts have been confined to the security industry, capturing low-framerate movies of hoodlums robbing retail stores. However, huge advances in video capture technology and rapidly-plummeting cost-per-gigabyte of hard drives have made such recording behemoths worthwhile for more (uh) important tasks, such as recording everything you can think of on TV.

10 tuners and gobs of storage aside, the coolest thing about this SnapStream DVR is its search interface. We've not seen anything like it in the DVR world: the DVR stores the closed captioning signal—where available—as a stream of text, which is then searchable by the end user like a database. Spelling errors on live television events aside, this allows users to flag any shows in which certain keywords pop up, and even send an e-mail alert when this happens. Selected programs can then be burned to DVD-R in standard MPEG-2 format that can be viewed by any media player.



The 10-channel DVR.

Unsurprisingly, SnapStream says that it is the keyword search feature that appeals the most to their clients. For example, a PR firm might like to monitor local and national news channels for a any mention of their client's product. Journalism students at Emerson College used the system to monitor and compare different news stories on the same topic (one wonders if the Daily Show staffers are using a similar product). City governments also found the device useful for monitoring news stories about their city and local government.

Prices for the technology range from $6,000 for a four-channel unit up to $15,000 for the Enterprise 10-channel system. A bit costly, to be sure, but for the target market such price ranges are not unusual.

Of course, the very nature of PC hardware and software means that prices will go down over time. Back when I worked at my security DVR company, we would sell a 4-channel unit for around $2,000, but these days you can buy a $100 capture card and software and install it on a $500 PC and get the same thing. The idea of fully-searchable transcript databases for all television programming will be a real boon to researchers and journalists anxious to tame the unruly tiger of information overload. It might even filter down to the consumer level at some point—wouldn't it be nice if your computer could watch all the boring channels for you and just filter out the ones you are interested in? Next thing you know, they'll be coming out with an Electric Monk...

Props to ZNF for spotting this product. We'll see if SnapStream will give us a review unit. Don't hold your breath!