We’ve covered SnapStream since just about Day 1 here at ZNF and, along the way, struck up a friendship with CEO Rakesh Agrawal – someone we highly respect and enjoy regularly running into at trade show cab lines. As the story goes, SnapStream very successfully pivoted from hobbyist HTPC solution (BeyondTV) to professional grade TV monitoring… with The Daily Show as an early, notable customer. Consisting of terabytes of storage, television transcription, and multi-pane viewing these guys offer all sorts of compelling business intelligence tools and Ars Technica recently visited their Houston office for an exposé worth checking out:
With 30 tuners and 30 TB of storage, SnapStream makes TiVos look like toys
SnapStream’s enterprise DVR clusters together multiple capture servers that all pool together their storage. The servers run Windows Server 2008R2 and the proprietary SnapStream application, and they each contain a stack of hard disk drives in a RAID 5 4+1 configuration. The SnapStream application uses Microsoft SQL Server for storing metadata, and recorded video files are stored on the NTFS-formatted file system as regular files. Larger customers can also use existing SAN or NAS systems […] Video is typically ingested into the SnapStream DVRs directly from a cable feed at 480p, 720p, or 1080i through component inputs on heavy-duty QAM capture cards, thus bypassing the need for CableCard