Hot Spot Video Interactivity with MPEG-4 - Part 1
Hot Spot Video Interactivity is starting to gain interest in the Streaming Media space and hopefully this interest will start more development of tools for MPEG-4 Interactivity . I believe it will be one of the high interest areas of streaming in the years to come, but for now the possibility is mainly one of excitment about the potential this brings to content providers and producers. With hot spot video interactivity viewers of streaming content, can get more details about a product, advance to another chapter in a video, or launch a website in a browser. There are plenty of other possibilities.
Currently, more development is needed for content creation tools and for media players capable of playing back MPEG-4 videos with hot spots.
Without question, creation tools and media players for proprietary formats such as Flash and QuickTime are blazing the trail for video interactivity with hot spots. These types of interactive experiences are possible with both formats today. However, streaming media is more today about standards (at least it should be) and while both the Flash and QuickTime formats provide great interactivity, it's locked into Proprietary formats. We need the capability to create hot spot video interactivity in standards such as MPEG-4. What this will mean is that you can have compliant MPEG-4 players that can playback hot spot interactive streaming videos, opening the door to greater viewership and life outside of proprietary media players.
In this multi-part article you'll learn more details about how MPEG-4 hot spot video interactivy works, what profiles are needed in MPEG-4 compliant players and possible tools on the horizon to make interactive streaming video a reality.
Other related articles:
Part 2 - Hot Spot Video Interactivity with MPEG-4
Part 3 - Hot Spot Video Interactivity with MPEG-4
Part 4 - Hot Spot Video Interactivity with MPEG-4
Author: Derrick Freeman
