Enter a couple of keywords (up to 5) into TV Trends and you’ll get a graph showing you the relative frequency of mentions of those words on mostly-news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN.

Here’s an example comparing mentions of Twitter and Facebook on national TV:

(click the “SnapStream TV Trends” link on top to see a larger more detailed version the graph)

So you can see Facebook was generally getting more mentions on national TV until February or March of this year when Twitter started taking over… and since then Twitter has consistently received more TV airtime than Facebook. And what about that big spike for twitter in mid-April? That was the whole Twitter/Oprah/Ashton Kutcher thing.

Here’s a comparison of mentions of tech giants Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo on traditional TV:

And the word ‘yes’ vs. the word ‘no’?

TV Trends graphs can be embedded into your website or blog using the simple embed code underneath the graph or you can link to graphs by just copying the URL from your browser’s address bar. And on the TV Trends site, you can view excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and you can filter the results by network (chart mentions of “Obama” on Fox or MSNBC) and by genre (show me mentions of “Obama” on comedy programs).

Another feature of TV Trends are hot and cold words… These are the top ascending (hot) and descending (cold) words on national television. For example, as I write this blog post, the top rising terms, the top hot words, are “north korea” and “two american journalists” — references to the two American journalists that have been sentenced to hard labor in North Korea.

While many types of analytics are available for other media (see Compete, Alexa, Trendrr) until now, there hasn’t been a way to track and analyze what’s being said on traditional television.  TV Trends attempts to offer some insight into the world of traditional “offline” television…

And behind the scenes, SnapStream TV Trends is powered by SnapStream’s TV recording and search technology. SnapStream’s TV search technology allows organizations to record LOTS of TV and then search inside those TV shows for mentions of their city government, “breaking news” on a competitive local TV station, an elected official, a natural disaster or anything else anyone might be looking for on TV. You can think of it like a cross between a DVR on steroids (one SnapStream Server can record 10 TV shows at a time) and a search engine. This technology powers TV trends and it’s behind TV monitoring at organizations such as E!’s The Soup, XM Radio, NBC, Current TV, the U.S. Senate, University of Southern California, University of Texas, City of Austin, and the City of Chicago. If you use a clipping service or, worse, a bank of VCRs or DVRs, to keep track of what’s being said on TV about your brand or whatever, you should give SnapStream Enterprise a look.

So try out TV Trends and let us know what you think! Post your questions and feedback here in the comments or on twitter (we’re at @snapstream).

Join us for our web seminar (June 23rd, 2:30 PM CST) specific for the communications offices of elected officials, and learn how your office can leverage TV content to interact with your constituents in a more responsive and efficient way.

Many government officials across the country are currently using SnapStream to aid them with television media monitoring. They are able to simultaneously record news channels (including CSPAN, CNN, Fox News, etc.) plus any internal cable TV feeds 24×7 and then search the closed-caption text for keyword mentions to keep track of legislation issues and media appearances. And with the relaxation of the Franking Rules this past January, they can now take advantage of SnapStream’s clipping feature to increase their online video presence by uploading video clips to their YouTube, House or Senate page.

SnapStream is currently used in the offices of elected officials to:

• Track TV mentions of officials, staff and legislation
• Create clips for online distribution
• Distribute TV using the existing office network
• Record & search thousands of hours of TV
• Eliminate manual search of video tapes and clipping fees

When compared to TiVos/DVRs, VCRs or clipping services, SnapStream provides dramatic improvements in cost and convenience.

Event: How Elected Officials Enhance their Media Monitoring Efforts
When: June 23rd, 2009; 2:30 CST

Sign me Up!

Tired of managing VCRs or TiVo’s? Looking for a better way to monitor press coverage? Register for our special web seminar geared towards Public Information Officers in government. The City of Austin will be the guest speaker and will be discussing how they were able to cut the costs associated with maintaining 12 unreliable VCRs by moving to a more cost-effective, unified solution – the SnapStream Server.

The City of Austin will discuss how they:

• Digitally record and archive all TV coverage
• Allow cross-departmental access to those recordings
• Instantaneously pinpoint mentions of interest
• Create clips from full recordings
• Use past coverage for training purposes
• Monitor newscasts
• Create daily media reports
• Respond appropriately and quickly to TV coverage

Event: Learn how the City of Austin monitors TV
When: June 2nd, 2009; 2:30 CST
Guest Speaker: City of Austin

Sign me Up!

SnapStream will be at NAB this year again, to demonstrate our new products and features. Come by and see us at our booth, South Upper Hall #SU6105 (Map)

The new products and features we’ll be demonstrating:

• QAM/ATSC Support: Record, search and clip QAM and ATSC broadcasts.
• Email Clip: Create a clip and email it using the Viewscape or Admin interface.
• Real-Time Search: Search for mentions of interest as they are being recorded.
• SnapStream Mini TV Search Appliance: For smaller organizations that stand to gain from searching television, but don’t need the full functionality of the SnapStream Server.

NABShow
April 17–23, 2009 • Las Vegas, NV
The NAB Show has evolved over the last eight decades to continually lead this ever-changing industry. And while the solutions at your fingertips have changed to keep pace with consumer lifestyles, habits and technologies, your aspirations to produce and deliver memorable content have remained consistent. From conception through distribution, the NAB Show has proudly served as the incubator for excellence – helping to breathe life into content everywhere.
www.nabshow.com

Let’s start with something simple, but important: scheduling manual recordings.

What is a manual recording, and why would I want to make one?

Our Enterprise software offers a powerful and intuitive program guide for scheduling recording jobs. But maybe you don’t care about the program guide data, and you just want to record based on time, as if you were setting a VCR- say you want to record a particular time on the same channel every day, regardless of what’s on. Maybe the program guide doesn’t have data for the channel you want to record, as is the case with public access, government and educational channels. Maybe you’re importing video from an A/V source- say, a VCR ;).

For these applications, you’ll want to use our Manual Recording feature, which allows you to control the specifics of when and where a recording will be dispatched.

 
Two different methods
 
There are two different methods for scheduling a manual recording. First, from Enterprise TV Link, go to Setup Recordings and select Set Up a Manual Recording. From this screen, you can set the name, recording schedule and channel for the manual recording.

Setting up a manual recording in Enterprise TV Link

Hints:

• To change the name of the recording, highlight the Name field and hit Enter, or just click on the existing name. 
• The options that will appear on the screen will change depending on the type of Recording Frequency you select- for example, the Block Size option will only appear when 24 Hours a Day is selected. Try flipping between the different Frequency options to see this for yourself. 
• You can’t specify the tuner on which a recording will be dispatched using this method. If you need to, you can do so after the job is scheduled by going to Recording Settings and Priorities and selecting View and Edit Details for the job.    

Second, you can use the Enterprise TV web admin. Select Setup Recordings and then Create a New Recording. You’ll be able to set many more options from this screen.

Setting up a manual recording in the web admin

Hints:

• This page allows you to enter custom metadata for your recording jobs. Metadata are tags attached to the recording that describe it, but aren’t part of the video. Along with the Title, you can specify the Series Description and Genre. If you want to change the title of a specific episode of this recording, you’ll need to edit the recording of that episode after it’s complete.
• The Start and Stop Recording options can be used to move the beginning or ending of the show. This is useful if the show may be delayed depending on another program that may  run over, like a sporting event.
• Some of the options on this page, like Video Source and ShowSqueeze, will cause the page to reload if changed. Don’t be alarmed if this happens.  

So how do I decide whether to schedule a manual recording through Enteprise TV Link or through the web admin?

Enterprise TV Link is the fastest, easiest way to schedule a manual recording. If you have a lot of recordings to schedule, or if you just don’t need a lot of control over all the options for the recording, this may save you some time. Additionally, if you are an administrator, you might want to instruct your users to use this method if you want to limit their access to options- this basically limits them to time, title and channel.

The web admin, on the other hand, offers much greater control over how the recording happens. You’ll want to use this method if:

• You have metadata that needs to be entered
• You want to specify the tuner on which the recording will happen 
• You want to change the quality at which the shows will be recorded
• You want to set custom ShowSqueeze options 
• You want the recording to expire based on age or a set number of episodes, or not to expire at all  

After the recording job is saved, most of these options are available in Enterprise TV Link through Setup Recordings → Recording Settings and Priorities, but in order to set them when you’re scheduling the job, you have to use the web admin.

• Download
• Burn to DVD
• Email

How it works:

Step 1: Once you’ve used the search feature to identify the segment of video you want to clip out, click on the “scissors” in the top navigation bar:

Step 2: Then, using the “Set Start” and “Set End” buttons above the timecode bar (or the shortcuts “Z” and “X” on your keyboard), simply set the beginning and end of the segment you want to clip out.  Remember, you can also use the “comma” and “period” shortcuts on your keyboard to skip backward in 7-second increments and forward in 30-second increments; you can also use the space bar to pause at the precise frame.  The left and right arrow keys allow you to move frame-by-frame through the video.

Step 3: Then simply hit “clip” and just that portion of the video broadcast will be saved separately as a clip in the clips area of your menu.  It also allows you to rename the clip for simplified recall.

Step 4: Then, from the full-screen interface, you can email that clip, or download it (and then even burn to DVD).

It’s as simple as that.  You can then erase the original program to make room for more recordings!  SnapStream’s Clipping feature makes it easy to work with video.

So as the PIO, you are responsible for being spokespeople for the City and for coordinating all other communications activities with the media and citizens. Being able to respond quickly to coverage relating to your city is key. SnapStream servers allow you to do just that. Using the TV search function, you can find whatever you’re looking for immediately, without having to scan through hours of media coverage manually.

The SnapStream Servers also give you the ability to edit out just the segment you need and then email or burn that clip to DVD. You can even have an email alert sent to you notifying you of mentions of whatever it is you’re looking for. Read more about SnapStream email alerts.

Do More With Less. With SnapStream, administrators can easily control who has access to the server and what features they have access to. For a lot of government groups, for example, access to media recordings is limited to one centralized group, and so those departments that have access are often overloaded with requests for copies of news coverage – which is both time-consuming and expensive.

By using SnapStream Servers to streamline your media monitoring efforts, you can:

• Improve reaction time to media coverage
• Eliminate costs of VHS tapes and shipping
• Give access to multiple departments; reducing unnecessary strain on one centralized group

Recently, The City of Austin was a guest speaker for a webinar we held on the benefits of using SnapStream for government media monitoring. Reyne Telles, the Media Relation Manager at “Corporate PIO” says that as the City of Austin has been on a hiring freeze and his team has been short-staffed, SnapStream has enabled his group to do more with less. Read more about how the City of Austin is using SnapStream.

http://tvsearcher.snapstream.com/

(And don’t worry, any links you had to the blog will still work…)

Here’s an overview of the City of Austin’s story before today’s webinar:

Background

First, some background.  The City of Austin is the 14th largest city in the United States, the capital of Texas and home to 700,000 residents. Known for its high-tech companies (for example, Dell and Samsung), its government, and seven-time Tour De France winner Lance Armstrong, Austin gets it’s fair share of attention in the media.

And Austin’s residents are active citizens, with a great interest in things happening in the City of Austin. Accordingly, there are six TV news organizations in Austin — ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, Univision and News 8 Austin — all of whom individually cover things happening in Austin City Government.  The City of Austin team estimates that there are probably 150 news stories about the City of Austin in any given month — that’s about 33 TV news stories a week!

Austin’s Public Information Office

Wikipedia has a good description of the job of a public information officer:

“Public Information Officers (PIOs) are the communications coordinators or spokespersons of certain governmental organizations (i.e. police departments, army, city, county, state governments). They differ from public relations departments of private organizations in that many of them typically do not engage in marketing, but solely in providing information to the public and the media…”

So Austin’s Public Information Offices are responsible for being spokespeople for the City and for coordinating all other communications activities with the media and citizens.

The City of Austin has one central public information group, called the “Corporate PIO”, and then there are another 25 to 30 department PIOs for each of Austin’s various city departments, including:

• Austin Police Department
• Austin Fire Department
• Austin Water
• Austin Energy
• Austin Convention Center
• Economic Growth and Redevelopment
• Parks and Recreation
• Public Works

Austin’s “Corporate PIO” handles anything relating to the central city management and larger issues that span multiple departments.  With 6 local TV news organizations and television being approximately 60% of all media mentions the city receives, monitoring TV has always been important to them.

How the City of Austin USED to monitor television

Before SnapStream, the City of Austin’s Corporate PIO and 25-30 department PIOs monitored television in a fragmented fashion — everyone was doing their own thing.

VCRs and VHS tapes: The “Corporate PIO” group and 2 other departments PIOs had large banks of VCRs that they used to record television onto VHS cassette tapes. Naturally, VCRs were a labor intensive solution.

DIY PC TV Recorders: Two other department PIOs had built their own DIY PC TV recording devices. These devices requires constant upkeep and maintenance and were, ultimately, unreliable.

What the rest did: All the other PIO department would call the “Corporate PIO” group asking to be sent physical VHS tape copies of media mentions they had received.  This put a lot of burden on the “Corporate PIO” group to take requests, dub tapes and then physically ship VHS tapes around the city.

So the way the City of Austin used to do media monitoring was fragmented (everyone was doing their own thing), expensive (lots of labor went into making recordings and then making cuts of those recordings), and time-consuming.

How the City of Austin monitors television TODAY (yes, with SnapStream!)

Sometime in 2007, Keith Reeves at the City of Austin saw a demonstration of SnapStream at a TATOA event and after a few more meetings, the City of Austin bought a 10-tuner SnapStream Server in 2008.

The Old Way: Stratatech was coordinating recording between 6 and 8 TV programs at once on cumbersome VCRs and VHS tapes and needed an easier way to schedule recordings.

“We would be recording anything from a NASCAR race, which can be multiple hours, to a two-hour basketball game throughout the day,” notes Fior Lostumbo, Sales Associate for Stratatech.

Some notes about the old, labor intensive VCR/VHS process at Stratatech:

• Television programs were scheduled manually by VCR and recorded on VHS tapes
• Once a program of interest was recorded, it then had to be manually reviewed by a human for mentions of their clients.
• Mentions would be tallied up and manually entered to a separate system, which they had designed to analyze the media exposure versus the cost to the client.

They needed a better and faster way to monitor television.

The SnapStream Way: Stratatech’s growing clientele prompted them to look for a more efficient TV monitoring solution.

The SnapStream Server delivered that solution, with the capacity to record up to eight channels at once, and enough storage for 2,300 hours of recordings. In addition, the SnapStream Server allowed Stratatech to automatically search closed-captioning data for mentions of their clients, making the data collection process much simpler, more efficient and more accurate.

Fior Lostumbo explains, “Previously, we would have to sit and listen to audio for mentions of our clients. Now we simply just use the keyword search feature, saving us immense amounts of time.”

Some of the benefits that SnapStream has brought to Stratatech’s media monitoring and analysis operation:

• Automated Scheduling:  Stratatech’s 8-tuner SnapStream Server gives them the ability to easily schedule and manage TV recordings and avoid conflict using a simple, easy-to-use interface.
• Faster, Automated Search: With SnapStream’s search technology, Stratatech is able to quickly and accurately pinpoint media mentions with a simple keyword search.
• Less Physical Space: Recording and archiving recordings digitally has eliminated banks of VHS tapes and VCRs.
• Integration using SnapStream’s powerful API: SnapStream’s powerful API (view the SnapStream Enterprise API) allowed Stratatech to integrate their in-house data collection system with TV data from the SnapStream Server, eliminating the need to manually input data from one system to another.

The old set up of VCRs:

Lots of VHS tapes, too:

The SnapStream set-up with Servers in the rack under the TV;  Stratatech can now schedule, record and search TV straight from their desktop: