Understanding current uses of video in Interactive Media

Platforms for Video in Interactive Media:

World Wide Web - is a system of linked hypertext documents that can be seen by using the internet. With a web browser you can see each web address that can contain images, text, videos and other mulitimedia. You can navigate between web pages using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web enabled the wide spread of information over the internet.

Email Attachments - when attaching a computer file or email attachment the file is not a seperate message, but now it is universally sent as part of the message to which it is attached. When the message is attached it can be sent unencoded or encoded in a number of ways: base64, binhex, unencoded, quoted-printable. In the standard internet e-mail format, messages and any attachment are sent as a single multipart message, usually using base64.

DVD - or also known as Digital Video/Versatile Disc is one of the most popular optical disc storage format. The main uses are video and data storage. DVD's are of the same dimensions as CD's but store more than six times as much data.

CD Rom - or also known as Compact Disc Read-Only Memory is a pre-pressed CD that contains data. While the CD format was originally designed for music storage and playback, it has recently been developed to hold any form of binary data.

Kiosks - or also known as interactive kiosks are computer terminals that provide information. Most kiosks provide unattended access to the web and web applications. These are usually found in learning centres, museums, airports, hotels and even doctors.

Presentations - you can use videos in presentations, through powerpoint or even videos for demonstraitions or helping someone understand a subject. They're educational videos on the interent that you can download and show.

Mobile Devices - are pocket-sized computing devices. They have a display screen with touch input or a small keyboard to help work the device. Mobile phones and even ipods/some MP3 players have a video output. You can record and watch back videos and even download videos onto your mobile device through the internet.

Uses of Video in Interactive Media:

Short Films - these can be small taster videos on the internet through iplayers or on websites. These small promotional films are shown to advertise a subject or project or even show a short animation.

Promotional Material - these videos are used to advertise a product or business. They can be shown as advertisements (like ad banners) on websites you visit or are even shown on the businesses website.

Film Trailers - these can be shown on webistes of the movie - like the seekthesigns website where the video is embedded on the main page. Or they can be shown on video searching sites like youtube and most video players.

User-generated Content - these videos are put on personal sites such as myspace, facebook and youtube.

Viral Marketing - and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing socail activities to produce an increase in brand awareness. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images or even text messages. The goal of marketers interested in creating viral marketing programs is to identify people with high social networking potential and create viral messages that appeal to this segment of the populaion and have a high probability of being passed along.

Advertising - through videos can usually be seen through videos and images on the internet when clicking through links on Google or even pages you may visit often (facebook and personal sites are often shown advertisements).

Virtual Reality Tours - these are when a business may want to sell a product or maybe even showing how a house or building may look like when finnished. These are to help sell the product and help convince a person that what they're looking at really is when the product will look like.

Games - videos on games are usually shown at the beginning to help show the plot of the game or half way through in intervals to help show the plot as it develops. This helps the player stay on the game so it's not constant game play. It also gives a sense of eye-candy for the player.

E-learning - or electronic learning is a type of technology where the medium of instruction is computer technology. E-learning is used interchangeably in a wide variety of context. In companies, it refers to the stratergies that use the company network to deliver training cources to employees. E-learning uses a wide spectrum of technologies, mainly internet or computer based to reach learners.

Video in Interactive Media Technology:

Compression - is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than an unencoded representation would use. Compression is useful because it helps reduce the consumption of hard disk space or bandwidth. On the downside when compressing data it may become not as good quality as the original video or image.

Formats:
MPEG- or also known as Moving Picture Experts Group was made to set standards for audio and cideo compression and transmission.

MOV - was created by Apple to use as a file format for Quicktime. MOV is a multimedia container file that one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects or text (for example for subtitles).

AVI- or also known as Audio Video Interleave is a multimedia container format created by Microsoft. AVI files can contain audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback.

Streaming - is multimedia that is constantly recieved by and end user while is it being delivered by a streaming provider. This refers to a delivery method.

Data-transfer Rates - or DTR is the amount of digital data that is moved from one place to another. The data transfer rate can be viewed as the speed of travel of a given amount of data. The greater the bandwidth of a given path, the higher the data transfer rate.

Frame Rates - is the measurement of the frequency rate at which a device produces consecutive images called frames. This applies to such devices as video cameras, film cameras and motion capture systems. Frame rate is often expressed as frames per second (FPS).

Screen Resolutions - this is the amount of pixels seen on screen. This can effect website design which can also effect what your video may look like at different screen resolutions. The most common screen resolution being 800x600 but some can be smaller or higher.

File Size - measures the size of a computer file. It is mainly measured in bytes. The amount of disk space consumed by the file depends on the file system. This effects video because if you have a large file it may take longer to buffer which makes the user wait for ages. Which is why you should compress a file so it is easier for the user to watch more easily and with less download time.

Ratios:
4:3 - standard definition for video formats
16:9 - wide screen or high definition television.

Media Players:
Flash - (Adobe Flash) is a multimedia platform. Flash is a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash video is a file format used to deliver videos over the internet using an Adove Flash Player. Flash video content may also be embedded within SWF files. Users of the Flash video format include YouTube, Google video and Yahoo video.

Quicktime - is a multimedia framework developed by Apple. Quicktime is capable of handling various formats of digital video, media clips, sound, text, animation, music and interactive panoramic images.

Windows Media Player - or WMP is a digital media player and media libary application created by Microsoft that is used for playing audio and video and viewing images.

Real - or Real Player is a proprietary cross-platform media player created by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG, Quicktime, Windows Media and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.

Rights Management Systems - is access control technologies used by hardware manufactures, publishers and copywright holders to limit usage of digital media or other devices. Rights management systems have been provided to companies such as Sony, Apple, Microsoft and the BBC.