Television programs such as “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” or “The Daily Show” generate multitudes of social media clips with viewers sharing favorite bits on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites.
Houston-based SnapStream helps those programs collect, search through, and leverage those TV clips and mentions to build audiences and advertising. It also helps those shows find the video clips used inside many of the comedy sketches on the programs, such as when Jon Stewart of The Daily Show shows a clip of a politician uttering a funny statement.
Rakesh Agrawal, SnapStream’s founder and CEO, describes the TV search service as a cross between “TiVo on steroids and Google.”
It works like this: Customers choose programming that they want to monitor and plug in search terms. SnapStream then monitors each program for mentions of the search term. You can view all the hits from your SnapStream account and also set daily e-mail alerts. (When Agrawal and I first spoke, the Blue Bell ice cream recall dominated the news. I received video clips related to that for more than a week.)
Some clients essentially use the service as a tech-enabled clipping service, which businesses, politicians, and others have employed to keep track of press mentions and to leverage the marketing opportunities wherein.
Since SnapStream began this service in 2007, the company has snagged high-profile clients such as comedienne Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, “The Daily Show,” and “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver, which air on Comedy Central and HBO, respectively. Other customers include political entities like the City of Houston’s mayor’s office and both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee.
“We build a bridge between social messages and what’s actually coming on TV,” Agrawal says. “The show gets free marketing out of this. We’re a tool for shows to live tweet and post live to Facebook. You can see video side-by-side with the messages.”
The service starts at a cost of $10,000 annually, a price tag more suited to large enterprise customers. So,
