A peek into SnapStream's lab at their Houston office, showing racks of SnapStream Enterprise Servers and disks.
Lee Hutchinson
When you're picking out a DVR for your home, there's a pretty short list of candidates—TiVo has its new 6-tuner DVRs, or you can get something from your cable provider, or you can roll your own. But consumer-grade DVRs don't really scale all that well for media companies that need to record and process lots of TV. When you've got 30 or more channels that you need to be recording simultaneously, your cable company's DVR isn't really up to snuff anymore and it's time to call in the big guns.
Houston-based SnapStream makes a line of DVRs that scale to truly silly sizes—its products are the monster trucks of the DVR world. If you watch TV at all, you've almost certainly already seen what SnapStream can do—popular shows like The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, The Soup, and tons of others are customers, using 30+ channel DVRs to record dozens and dozens of TV shows simultaneously in order to integrate clips from those recorded shows into their own.
Enlarge / The SnapStream offices near downtown Houston are filled with neat TV memorabilia. Marketing director Rachel Eichenbaum's office, for example, features a Mad Men silhouette falling down against the skyline.
But SnapStream's boxes do a lot more than simply record TV—they're actually a home theater PC geek's dream. Because Snapstream works so closely with media production companies, its DVRs sport functionality that no consumer set could possibly get away with having. For example, a SnapStream cluster is just as good at repackaging, transcoding, and distributing content for re-use as it is for recording it in the first place—functionality you won't find on a consumer-grade DVR. The system also gives users the most amazing TV guide access we've ever laid eyes on, wrapped in a simple and almost ludicrously fast GUI.
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