Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Houston-based SnapStream has the ultimate toys for serious TV junkies: monstrous 30TB DVRs that can record 30 channels at the same time, with a Web-based interface that combines the best damn TV-guide grid we’ve ever laid eyes on with fast searching, clipping, and collaboration tools. The problem is that the entry-level price tag of $10,000 means they’re not really consumer-based products—they’re intended for use in media production, where shows like The Colbert Report and The Soup need to collect thousands of hours of TV every week and clip out the bits they need to highlight in their broadcasts.

SnapStream’s newest product still isn’t quite a consumer device—but it is aimed at eliminating most of the price-related barriers to entry for businesses. The SnapStream Express, announced today, has almost all of the same software-based functionality of the big SnapStream products, but in a small PC-style form factor. And instead of $10,000 and up, it will cost $500 (though there will also be a $100 per month service fee).

Prior to the product’s launch, we spent an afternoon at SnapStream’s office with CEO Rakesh Agrawal and Engineering Director Jason Baumeister walking through exactly what the SnapStream Express does. At first blush, it seems like the perfect DVR for a consumer who wants SnapStream-style advanced features. The Express is a two-tuner DVR with 2TB of internal storage, and it will record from whatever your TV source is, be it an over-the-air antenna or the output jacks of a cable or satellite box.

Software-wise, the Express has the same Web-based interface as the company’s big DVRs, with almost all of the same features. The killer one is an intelligent search function that keys off of closed captioning, allowing a user to search for anything that was said on-air during a recorded program and jump directly to the relevant portion of the program. The box also allows things that consumer-grade DVRs don’t—with only a few clicks, you can take clips of shows and share them over the Internet or turn them into animated .GIFs with meme-style text overlays and post them to Facebook or Twitter, all from within the interface.







That kind of fast social interactivity is where SnapStream sees the Express succeeding. The product isn’t really intended for the home market—if nothing else the $100/month service fee keeps the device pretty firmly out of most consumers’ budgets—but rather for media companies that produce television shows and want to be able to pull in and talk with customers as those shows air.

By way of example, Agrawal pulled up a test box that was recording the soap opera Days of Our Lives as we sat in the SnapStream conference room. Soaps have an enormous following online, with thousands and thousands of viewers effectively live-tweeting each episode (seriously—I had no idea, but it’s true). While we watched Days in the SnapStream web interface, the interface’s integrated social media feed began displaying tweets that Twitter users were making about the program; clicking on a tweet would cause the interface to jump back in time to the approximate moment in the show that was playing when the tweet was posted.





Taking things a bit further, Agrawal noticed that several folks were tweeting about Victor—one of the show’s characters—and so using the closed captioning search he quickly located a moment where Victor was on screen, grabbed a still image of the character, overlaid some text on it, and tweeted it back at one of the viewers. Then, he grabbed a few seconds of the scene, transformed it into a fast-motion animated .GIF ("Everything is funnier at 4x speed!" he said as the .GIF was encoding), and tweeted that with the "#days" hashtag.

The intent is obvious—SnapStream wants to get Express boxes into the hands of social media managers at any company with a presence on television. The function of being able to record live TV is really secondary to the social interactivity that is possible with the box’s functions—tracking what people are saying about your show or product as it happens and being able to respond not just with text but also with meme-style images and .GIFs, or even sharing out full video clips (something that according to SnapStream is often easier to do from a TV stream than from a company’s own internal production archives).

SnapStream’s Express is available immediately at the company's online store. Agrawal doesn’t expect there to be much take-up in regular viewers, but customers who want the functionality and don’t mind the $100/month service charge certainly won’t be turned away.

Listing image by Lee Hutchinson