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This Comedy Bit is Brought to You by SnapStream

Current TV and infoMania replace "messy" DVR setup with centralized TV Search appliances.

Project Date: 2009

Current, co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, is a cross-platform media company that integrates broadcast television (Current TV) and Web technologies (Current.com). Its mission is to connect young adults with the world around them through original content that's produced by both traditional and citizen journalists. Current's award-winning series reach viewers in more than 59 million households and cover everything from cultural trends to hot-button social issues. One of these innovative programs is infoMania, a satirical take on the latest news and pop culture events.

The Los Angeles-based show's producers—who once relied on consumer software and multiple DVRs to maintain its media archive—now use a six-tuner SnapStream appliance to record, search, and grab video clips for their weekly commentary. A second system installed in Current's San Francisco office is used for corporate media-monitoring purposes.

The Challenge

infoMania's commentators typically identify media trends – specific events, catch phrases, general topics—and then put their own humorous spin on them. They routinely use video clips culled from TV and the Web to illustrate their points and set up jokes. But, back in April 2008 when the show debuted, its staff members were doing extra work to track down the desired footage.

"We had a ton of DVRs from our cable provider," recalls Daniel Freed, the show's supervising producer. "DVRs are tough because fast-forwarding and rewinding through them is kind of a nightmare, and really all that you have to go on are visual cues. We also searched for program transcripts in Lexis-Nexis and, hopefully, stuff that came up there had actually been recorded on one of our DVRs." But sometimes it didn't—and, besides that, the process was laborious.

Meanwhile, folks back at headquarters were using a homegrown set-up to get live news feeds and to monitor media mentions of the company, says Dave Simon, global senior broadcast engineer for Current. "We had an off-the-shelf piece of software and built our own DVR. That, too, was a six-tuner version. It was a good effort, but after a while, it just flat-out stopped working. After repeated attempts to fix it, we threw up our hands. We also used the cable company's DVR set-top boxes. Our third main source was YouTube and other online sources; we would get much lower quality out of those."

So Current and infoMania sought a more efficient, reliable means for capturing and searching TV broadcasts. They found it in a pair of SnapStream appliances. "It was sold to us as a turnkey solution with a rugged chassis, a RAID, proper server-class hardware, and good capture cards as well. To see that kind of quality gave us reassurance that it’d work." It did. Freed attests: "When we got SnapStream, around the office it became known as the 'super' version of the old system. Not only does it not crash, but it does all this other stuff, too."

The Solution

Current now uses SnapStream not only to make infoMania, but also to monitor media mentions of the company itself. It also calls upon SnapStream for its corporate video and news feeds. The biggest gain overall, according to Simon, is the ability to find media fast. "The SnapStream system was the first that we looked at that had the ability to record and search closed-captioning," he says. "To a television operation like infoMania, that is paramount."

SnapStream's powerful technology allows infoMania to record a half dozen shows simultaneously and store hundreds of hours of recorded television. Its producers can then quickly locate the desired footage by keyword. For example, infoMania uses SnapStream to put together the show's opening, in which host Conor Knighton uses clips of various members of the media to describe the episode of infoMania that the viewer is about to watch.

"We use clips of people saying things like, 'Fun!' 'Scary' or 'pathetic.' And that's all done through SnapStream," Freed explains. "We did one with "really, really" – "really, really awesome," "really, really great," etc. You can search for "really really," and it gives you a whole list. Prior to that, with a DVR—well, using a DVR, you're kind of lost. There's nothing to help you figure out what's there, except to watch the whole show or do a transcript search. Sometimes you don't have what the transcript turned up on the DVR. With SnapStream, you know that if it comes up on the transcript search, it's going to be there."

For the same episode, the infoMania staff also used SnapStream to put together various pundits using sports references to discuss U.S. health care legislation. "The health care bill passing in the House came a few days after the World Series ended. The media like to break down news with analogies, so I knew they'd be using baseball terms. We did a search for the word 'analogy,' then also 'health,' 'inning," 'baseball,' and/or 'pitcher.' It's not that likely that someone is going the say both 'health' and 'baseball' together unless they're making an analogy. It helped us quickly find video clips, and I think it made for a funny bit."

infoMania writers search for all instances of "really really."

Final product aired in November 2009.