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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
I think this is great news for the TCR and TDS staffs! I am all for making their work easier! But, if I were a part of the MSM, I would find this information a bit scary. Now these shows will have faster access to their content–for better or worse [and we all know which one produces more laughs!!!]
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Wow, this is really neat! I always wondered about sifting through all that content – it’s got to be pretty time consuming. This should certainly help them out!
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I loved that story a while back about the guy over at TDS who’s like, the human memory bank who pretty much remembered every little thing people said and would go back and find the clips. That blew my mind. I’m sure he’ll work at lightning speed now!
Also, I think this should be a HUGE hint to the “real” newsmedia to perhaps invest in this technology so they can get back to some ACTUAL, SUBSTANTIVE reporting for once.
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I applaud your optimism about “real” news media getting the hint. :)
It’s a shame the “Soup’s” clip included only the most recent shows – I was really looking forward to the Stephen/Meredith Viera exchange!
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Thanks for this article! I’ve always been amazed at the fantastic clips both TDS and TCR manage to find and use on the air – hopefully this makes the process (which I’m sure can get entertaining but also agonizing) that much easier!
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yeah i always wondered if they already had a search engine for all their clips, but that would mean somebody would have to transcribe everything they record or something. yikes!
it’s like, how in the heck did they go back so far in their bank of news clips for their montages where they keep showing different news segments saying the same word, like their “making progress” montage?
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