Ever wonder how the staff of the Report manages to sift through so many hours of news programs to find that one golden moment they can transform into hilarious satire? The Houston Chronicle‘s TechBlog reports that Houston-based company SnapStream Media is providing both TDS and TCR with new technology to make that task easier.

Houston’s SnapStream to power The Daily Show, Colbert Report
posted by Purva Patel
December 21, 2009

Producers for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report monitor and sift through hours of television newscasts to produce their satirical news shows. They plan to automate the process soon by using Houston-based SnapStream Media’s technology to record and search for relevant clips to use on their shows, replacing banks of VCRs and TiVos.

. . .

“They monitor a lot of television over there. They’ll be able to record 30 simultaneous shows at once,” said Rakesh Agrawal, chief executive officer of SnapStream Media.

SnapStream’s technology, described as a “cross between a DVR and a search engine”, lets users record video and then search it for specific content, such as the mention of a specific name or word. The searches find hits by scouring the closed captioning and other data embedded in commercial programming.

. . .

The company had sent a sample server to The Colbert Report more than a year and a half ago, but a writers strike shut the show down for a few months. The deal finally closed last week, as the shows tied the revamp to their move to HD, Agrawal said.

. . .

Read the full article here

If you click through to the article, they’ve posted an example of a segment for The Soup that was created using this technology. (It’s an irritating clip, but you’ll get the point.) It looks like this will make a very labor-intensive task much easier for the TCR staff. I’m not a tech geek by any means, but it sounds pretty darn cool to me.

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