The Technology Behind The Daily Show And Its Progeny

April 2, 2015 in Daily Bulletin

First there was Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Now there is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and other upcoming shows in the pipeline. Nicole Dieker looked at the media clipping technology that made the shows work:

  • SnapStream is a company that creates technology that allows for people to either continuously record an entire channel, or to record individual shows.
  • It saves the closed captioning for the shows thus creating a searchable database of terms used.
  • For example, a search for “Obama” will reveal each of the times that the President’s name was used, and the context it was used in.
  • Users of the program can then click on the link and directly go to the segment where the mention was made.
  • The program has social capabilities to create real time gifs and memes.
  • Right now only enterprise customers use it, but in the future it might be made available to a wider audience on the web.
  • Netflix or Hulu might compete with the service by offering their own text searchable database of shows.
  • A search engine could potentially acquire the company and then make money by referring people to places where they can purchase clips that they search for.

Read about the technology, its search engine like interface, why it was created, and more over here.

Source: SplitSider