SnapStream Media has launched a new tool called TV Trends that lets you track how frequently a word or term is mentioned on major US television channels. SnapStream is the company behind the BeyondTV personal video recorder software and the ill-fated Couchville web-based program guide.

The company also offers an enterprise package called Snapstream Server which can record up to 10 channels at a time, and store up to 9,000 hours of programming. It also captures data like closed captioning. So it's not surprising that Snapstream is recording thousands of hours of TV at a time and is able to process the data to look for keywords.

TV Trends doesn't promise to capture every single mention of a term on television. But Snapstream is tracking all of the major broadcast networks in the US as well we cable news networks.

You can track a single term or multiple search terms. And you can filter results by genres, TV networks, or term periods. You can also embed the charts on any web page. Sure, TV Trends is probably just a promotional tool to get people to notice Snapstream's commercial PVR products. But it's also a pretty nifty way to get a handle on what people are talking about on TV.

[via SnapStream Blog

SnapStream Media's BeyondTV application for Windows is one of a handful of applications that should make anyone think twice about purchasing a TiVo or cable company DVR. Like Windows Media Center, SageTV, and MythTV for Linux, BeyondTV lets users record and pause live TV on a PC and do a whole bunch of other things like shrink videos using DiVX or Windows media compression. But one thing that BeyondTV hasn't done a great job of up until recently is allowing users to placeshift or watch video recorded on one PC on another machine.

But the latest beta version of BeyondTV adds a nifty placeshifting feature utilizing Microsoft's Silverlight technology. Users can login to the web administration interface for their accounts to see a list of recorded programs. In the options menu is a button that says placeshift. Click it and BeyondTV will analyze the recorded show and your internet connection and transcode the video in real-time for streaming over the internet.

In other words, if BeyondTV is a TiVo killer (for ubergeeks who would rather build their own, anyway), BeyondTV 4.9 beta is a Slingbox killer (again, for the ubergeek set).

BeyondTV is available for $70 or you can download a free trial version.

Now that internet TV platform Joost is actually signing deals to get content you might actually want to watch from CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, you might be wondering how to watch Joost on your TV set.

While Joost really does make watching online videos a bit more like watching TV and a bit less like surfing the web, you still pretty much need to use a keyboard to navigate. And that means even if you run a line from the video-out port on your computer or graphics card to your TV, it's no easy feat to watch Joost on the big screen.

Luckily, you can map the keyboard shortcuts to most PC remote controls. And you can even add an icon to your Windows Media Center Program Library that will start and stop Joost. Here are a few tips:

Snapstream Media, the company behind the PVR software BeyondTV, has launched a new TV listing website called Couchville. It's not as flashy as some other Web 2.0 TV guides like MeeVee, but what Couchville does, it does very well.

The main thing that sets Couchville apart from other sites like TVGuide.com or Zap2it is that it has a web 2.0, AJAX feel to it. Instead of clicking on a "next page" button and waiting for a page refresh to get new listings, Couchville lets you drag the guide with your mouse much the way you navigate Google Maps.

Clicking on a listing brings up information about the series, episode, and upcoming episodes. Snapstream has also integrated BeyondTV Buzz, which lets you see what BeyondTV users have recorded over the last week as well as their top scheduled upcoming recordings. Eventually Snapstream plans to allow BeyondTV users to schedule recordings through Couchville, but the website is meant to appeal to a wider audience than BeyondTV users.

SnapStream Media releases version 4.5 of its personal video recorder, BeyondTV today. 4.5 is a dot release, and doesn't feature any spectacular changes. Version 4.0 for example, added support for HDTV and DivX. But there is one major new feature. For $30, SnapStream is selling a DVD burning plugin that integrates directly into the BeyondTV interface. Now, when you record a show, you can choose to play, delete, save, or burn to DVD.

Since BeyondTV records in MPEG-2, DivX, and WMV formats, you could always have burned your own video-DVDs. But the ability to do it with your remote control from 10 feet away is new. If you've recorded programs in DivX or WMV, BeyondTV will automatically convert them into DVD-compliant MPEG-2 files. Or if you've recorded a high definition program using an over-the-air ATSC TV capture card, BeyondTV will convert the file into a high quality DVD. There's no support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burning yet, but Snapstream CEO Rakesh Agrawal says those features are planned for future releases.

I interviewed Agrawal for this week's PVR Wire Podcast. You can hear him describe some of the other features in BeyondTV 4.5, as well as the impact he thinks Windows Vista will have on 3rd party personal video recorder programs like BeyondTV and SageTV. Several of the retail versions of Vista will ship with Media Center functionality.

The commercial software PVR landscape has been dominated by SnapStream and SageTV. Both products install on Windows, and both have loyal followings. Recently SageTV made an interesting move; they've released a version of SageTV for Linux, which includes either the software to install on your existing Linux system, or a complete Linux distribution as part of the setup kit.

The idea here is that you can basically create your own dedicated PVR, much like a Tivo or PVR you might get from your local cable provider. As a SnapStream user for years, I always sort of thought that having my PVR running on Windows was an advantage, since I know Windows and was able to hack it to my heart's content. But having recently upgraded my cable subscription, I've opted to get the HD PVR that my cable provider offers, and retired my SnapStream box. I'd be lying if I said that system reliability didn't have at least something to do with prompting me to go with a different solution.

So I can see why you might be tempted to go to a closed-box solution, taking your flaky Windows PC based PVR and installing linux and SageTV on it. At least you then still have access to the system to make modifications if you desire. In any event, it's certainly an interesting offering in the commercial software PVR arena.

Product Description

SnapStream's Beyond TV product is a Windows-based Personal Video Recorder (PVR) similar to TiVo or Microsoft's Media Center PC television functionality. It allows you to take any Windows PC (that meets the hardware requirements) and use it to pause and rewind live television, as well as schedule shows to be recorded based on a number of different schedules.

The Beyond TV moniker was applied to SnapStream's offering back when they transitioned from version 2 to version 3 of what was then simply known as SnapStream Personal Video Recorder. The Beyond TV branding allowed SnapStream to branch out into other areas, such as Beyond Media (photos, music and home video management), Beyond TV Link (watching shows from remote computers), and even into hardware with their Firefly brand of remote controls. For the purposes of this review, we'll be sticking to Beyond TV 4.0, which was released late in 2005.

I’ve been a SnapStream customer since before their product was called Beyond TV, and rarely have I gone through an upgrade to such a complicated and historically finicky piece of software that was as painless as the upgrade to version 4.0 was this time around. It made me not mind that I had to pay for the upgrade. Beyond TV is a Windows-based PVR (Personal Video Recorder) software package that allows you to turn a PC into a souped up Tivo. If you have the inclination to take a relatively modest PC - mine runs on a 4 year old AMD Duron 700 machine running at 900 MHz with 512 MB of RAM - and swap out a few parts, you can have yourself a PVR that gives you complete control of your shows.

Among Beyond TV’s best features include the fact that it records all video in the relatively ubiquitous MPEG 2 format, with no encryption or other impediments to moving it around. It can also transcode video to smaller formats like Microsoft’s Windows Media or now DivX, which makes the video that much more portable. You can get video off of your Tivo, but I guarantee it isn’t nearly as easy.

While there are still odd hiccups in Beyond TV 4.0, it’s a must-upgrade for any current Beyond TV users, and well worth downloading the trial version for anyone considering making their own PVR.