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The Jed Report’s Search for Timely Political Television

October, 2008

Active in the political arena for many years, Jed Lewison started a video blog in early 2007 called The Jed Report to track the 2008 presidential election from a pro-Obama perspective. In October 2008, Jed began video blogging for Daily Kos TV. Jed's niche within the blogosphere is video, and to produce video he needed a tool that would allow him to quickly sift through the incredible volume of political news coverage broadcast on cable networks.

Jed’s video blog posts on YouTube have seen more than 12 ½ million views overall; several have seen more than 300,000 views each. So the ability to immediately identify and work with current television broadcasts is crucial to his success as a political commentator. The SnapStream Enterprise TV search appliance gave Jed the ability to quickly and easily find, and work with, pertinent TV clips – saving both time and hassle – and enabling him to focus on what was most important to him: the content itself.

The Challenge

To create his video commentaries, Jed used a combination of tools and steps:

A hacked version of Microsoft Media Center Edition
A 3rd party tool that allowed him to extract closed-captioning data from video, which he then used to search for the TV clip he needed
Once the clip was identified in text, Jed manually matched up the timecode of that text to the correct point in the video
Once the segment of video was identified, he could then edit out the clip using open source FFMPEG, and then finally use that segment to produce his video post

While this system allowed him to source TV clips, it was far from ideal. Moreover, the instability of his set-up was a drawback.

The Solution

The SnapStream Enterprise appliance gave Jed the ability to quickly search, identify and begin editing television broadcasts as he needed them – in real time – and just as importantly, it did so reliably. As Jed described it, “The reliability is as rock solid as you get.” The integrated solution allowed him to:

Record up to four channels at once, including enough storage for 24 hour per day, 7 day a week recording of the major networks as well as one-off programming
Automatically search closed-captioning data for relevant television
Immediately find and edit television (even while a TV show was still being broadcast)

One example of Jed’s use of the SnapStream TV search function was in the creation of the video post “Obama Knew It Was Coming All Along.” The video blog compared Democratic Presidential candidate Obama’s prediction on the ways the Republican campaign would attack him, and set those against the actual occurrences. Jed used the TV search appliance, for example, to search for “pal around with terrorists” to find a TV clip where Republican VP candidate Palin made that comment. Jed explains, “The best thing is the searchability…the ability to jump straight into something just remembering a few words. Being able to find exactly where someone said something.”

This solution also gave Jed the ability to do things he hadn’t been able to do before, including a comparison on the frequency of words used surrounding the presidential election – comparing Fox News with CNN and MSNBC. You can read those posts here: The FOX Propaganda Network By the Numbers and here: ACORN-Mania: FOX vs. The Middle Class