Short-form content is all the rage these days. It’s not just that TikTok and YouTube are popular, it’s that so many people (especially young people) seem prefer to consuming media in “clips”—and late-night TV is no exception. Today’s audiences might not sit down in front of their TV to watch Last Week Tonight the second it airs, but that doesn’t mean John Oliver’s monologues are going unheard.
This “clip culture,” of course, has long been a key part of late night’s DNA. Tune into The Daily Show or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and you’ll frequently see the hosts pulling up short clips—from CNN soundbites to a few seconds of a Trump speech—that help contextualize what they’re talking about. It’s sort of a cycle: Jon Stewart will play a clip, and then that clip of Stewart talking about said clip will go viral.
But how is it that The Daily Show is able to source, for example, this very precise snippet of CNBC saying that Trump nominating Matt Gaetz for attorney general is sure to “raise some eyebrows”?
Enter SnapStream, a software company based in Houston, Texas. The organization, which was founded in 2000, describes itself as “the premier live video clipping product that helps organizations harness the power of moments.” Basically, SnapStream functions as a tool for news, media, and other organizations to quickly search, capture, create, and share video clips (disclosure: LateNighter also uses SnapStream).
SnapStream’s customers include ABC, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Sinclair, Crooked Media, NPR, Newsmax, PBS NewsHour, Penske Media Company, and Salesforce. On the late-night front, the company works directly with The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Canada’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Late night, and The Daily Show in particular, has actually played a large role in SnapStream’s growth. “We owe the business-to-business (B2B) era of our company’s history and growth largely to The Daily Show, one of our first enterprise customers going back to 2007 and one of our longest customers,” Graham Lampa, Director of Business Development, tells LateNighter.
So, how exactly do these late-night shows use SnapStream? We asked SnapStream’s Video Production and Marketing Manager Brennan Murphy to break it down for us. (Before joining the company, he worked at The Daily Show and then The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he used SnapStream to help source clips for the shows.)
“Late-night shows have monologues, and often those monologues include footage of what happened during the day—SnapStream is used to help get that footage,” Murphy says. “Let’s say something happened on CNN and the host is talking about it. A footage /studio team will have been monitoring that and will send it to the producers who produce the monologue to make sure it gets into the show.”
Murphy explains that before SnapStream came along, sourcing these clips was a lot more difficult. “The studio departments would previously use products like TiVos or manual DVR recordings, and then have interns be like, ‘Oh hey, did this person just say that thing? Can you find and time-code that?’” he tells LateNighter. Now, writers can just search for specific soundbites or quotes and pretty much have them ready to go.
To be sure, SnapStream and late-night television enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. “Late night was really the beginning of SnapStream’s growth,” SnapStream’s founder and CEO Rakesh Agrawal tells LateNighter. “Winning The Daily Show and Colbert represented the birth of SnapStream.”
At the same time, Agrawal says, SnapStream fundamentally “transformed” the setup of late-night shows. “We didn’t just make them more efficient, we extended the reach of watching, searching, and clipping beyond post-production to writers and producers of the show,” he explains. “SnapStream changed how they pitch segment ideas for the show and how writers, producers, and post-production collaborate at the shows. SnapStream enabled The Daily Show and Colbert to do things they simply could not do before.”
Late-night shows also rely on SnapStream to search for relevant archival footage. For instance, Murphy recalls once working on a segment that used clips to compare a Trump scandal to Obama’s tan suit “scandal.”
Different shows use SnapStream slightly differently. “On Last Week Tonight, the live monitoring is still important, but they’re gonna ship that [footage] in once a week,” Murphy says. “Versus The Daily Show, Colbert, and other shows [that ship] it every night to their monologue or social team.”
Additionally, Murphy adds, shows will often prefer to source their footage from a particular network: “For example, Colbert’s SnapStream is going to use a lot of CBS or CBSN footage because they’re on CBS.”
Like any tech company, SnapStream has had to evolve to keep up with industry changes, like the pivot to streaming. “For customers who need to capture streaming content, SnapStream offers a ‘Source Acquisition’ feature to record and transcribe content that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to record without significant manual effort and expertise,” Lampa says.
So, now we have a decent understanding of how late-night shows use SnapStream to get these clips. But what about the clips of these shows that go viral? Does SnapStream play a role in that too? The company certainly thinks so.
“The public focus on sharing clips and moments vs consuming entire episodes or shows is not just a trend SnapStream has responded to,” Lampa tells LateNighter. “It’s actually something we’re largely responsible for.”
“If it’s a TV clip and it’s going viral, there’s a fair chance the original clip was captured in SnapStream and shared by a user at one of our customers before it went viral,” he adds. “Organizations from the U.S. House of Representatives to Crooked Media are all using us to take long-form video, chop it up, and share moments that matter.”
While the future of terrestrial TV is increasingly uncertain, SnapStream doesn’t plan on scaling back from late-night any time soon. In fact, it’s doing just the opposite.
“We’ve explored other areas to expand our business, but we’re now very much doubling down in our focus on live TV, including late night,” Lampa says. “We often hear through the industry grapevine about new comedy clip shows that are in the works and connect with their creators and producers before they even launch to discuss how SnapStream could be of value to them.”
Additionally, SnapStream is finding more ways to utilize AI—though Lampa emphasizes that it’s meant to “augment” human involvement rather than replace it. Recently, the company debuted a feature called AI Chapters, which helps users identify topics within recordings and generate clips more quickly. Also in the works is an AI summary feature, which “creates a first draft social media posting based on the clip’s transcript.”
SnapStream especially prides itself on being accessible to all sorts of consumers, rather than just tech people and professionals.
“A lot of the people who use our product are not professional video people,” Lampa says. “They’re writers, they’re journalists, they’re researchers. And because it’s accessible to them, it makes working with video more like working with text, because you can search for what you’re looking for, you can highlight in the transcript.”
“All of that is why I think SnapStream has been central to this growth of clips, especially news clips,” he adds, circling back to the idea of ‘clip culture’. “It’s hard to explain, because we just, like, invented the whole thing.”
