earlier this month, SnapStream introduced what Agrawal calls an “express” version of the service aimed at smaller businesses or local political campaigns that wouldn’t typically require the heavy-duty monitoring of four channels of television (this covers the major networks) and the related social media. “The Ellen Show,” for example, goes from 1,000 tweets to 10,000 tweets during showtime, and many of those tweets include real-time video clips, he says. Clips from the show might also be shown on news broadcasts around the country.
A small business, by contrast, might only want to monitor the local evening newscast or the TV show it was advertising. “This is more of a replacement for the TiVo or the cable company set-top box,” he says. “These businesses only need to record one channel, for a hour or a half an hour every day.”
The cost of the express service—$499 upfront with a monthly fee of $99—is about in line with what these customers are already paying for DVR services, he adds.
The move to sell an express service is the latest for SnapStream, which started out as a consumer-focused product to help customers “turn their PC into a DVR” in 2001. SnapStream made a “few hundred thousand sales” through major electronics stores, Agrawal says. “We were profitable, but we knew that looking forward, we were going to run out of people to sell it to,” he adds.
He and his partners founded a television-centric social media network called Couchville, which attracted as many as a million users per month but didn’t make money.
The eventually stumbled onto the importance of TV search, he says. “There was a lot of manual labor going into finding stuff within the recordings, so we decided to do the search function,” Agrawal says. “We knew if we built TV search for them, it would be a game changer.”
