Windows Media: JavaScript Buttons

Getting control of the graphic images for the Windows Media Player is only the first step. JavaScript allows you to go far beyond this and make the video interact with other elements on the page. I believe this is the true power of streaming video. If you put streaming video up against TV its going to lose every time, the quality just isn't there yet, and who wants to sit at their desk and watch video. The power of streaming is unleashed when video is made part of a video application where the video is complimented by elements such as synchronized slides, chat, user feedback and the ability to pause the video while you explore something else. These are things that Interactive TV (ITV) is still a long way from doing. Believe me, I developed ITV for Discovery Channel and ITV is not going to be catching up to the Web soon in this regard, despite the hype.

Streaming Media Applications

Developing streaming applications is a lot harder than merely digitizing video and placing it on the Web. That's why you haven't seen a lot of it yet, because the tools for development are in their infancy. Later on we're going to take a look at some tools by SofTV that are making Streaming Applications happen now with WYSIWYG tools. These visual layout tools are what is needed to make creating a video application as easy as producing a PowerPoint slide show. Let's look at streaming applications and how they are used in the consumer and more importantly the corporate market place.

Video on Demand

What is going to make the consumer want to watch video on their computer instead of on their TV? Well the first thing is video on demand (VOD). You can watch video whenever you want. Did you miss the sports highlights at 11 PM? Well ESPN still has them available whenever you want, 24 hours at day.

Is there a channel you don't get? I don't get TechTV, put out by CNET, here in Washington DC. You'd think we would ... but we don't. But I can check the clips on CNET's site at CNET TV.

OK, you're saying devices like the Tivo can time-shift TV and record it. That's true, but they can only hold 30 hours. The Web, especially with a broadband connection, can hold unlimited amounts of video.

Chapterization

For those of you who own DVDs you know that movies are "chapterized". In other words, they are broken down into bite- size nuggets so you can skip around in the movie and find the scene where the guy has his heart ripped out of his chest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (love that scene). Movies are a lousy use of this technology since they are usually viewed as a whole, but what if you applied this technology to sports, news, or financial data?

Being able to search through video can be very powerful. Key word searching such as Virage is still difficult especially if you're relying on speech recognition software. However, if you combine the key points with thumbnail images pulled from the video, the user can then visually search the video. In many ways you're using an application that resembles a video editing system. Check out a demo of scrolling thumbnails on my Crosscasting site.

Chapterization is especially useful in training in business. If a worker needs some remedial training on how to perform a specific task, they can go to the video, skip directly to the part they need, get the information and get back to work. If they have to pull the information from VHS video tape then they need to located the tape, find a VCR and spend lots of time rewinding and fast forwarding to find the section they need.

Searchable Video

The next step beyond chapterized video is searchable video. Using this technology you can search to find when a specific word was said during the presentation. You can also turn the spoken word into searchable text via voice recognition. In theory, this sounds great, making video as easy to search as Web pages through a search engine. Unfortunately this technology falls under the field of jet packs and flying cars — we never seem to quite get there. Believe me I've tried.

Back when I was at Discovery Channel, we ran Virage's speech recognition package. Even with a great video source — Discovery programming — the program could only get around 50% right and it had a horrible time with proper nouns (people, places and things). Since these are the kind of words you would want to search against, the process was almost useless. The best searches happened when the program had closed captioning and the Virage suite could pull the text directly from the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). For those of you not familiar with the VBI it is extra lines in the TV signal that are not devoted to the picture. In recent years they have been dedicated to closed captioning text. In Europe the VBI is dedicated to TeleText channels that resemble text-only pages displayed on your TV.

These speech recognition programs become even less valuable in the Enterprise where the video rarely if ever has closed captioning added. In addition, corporate video has a wide variety of accents and poorly recorded sound. This type of speech simply can't be understood by the speech recognition programs.

True searchable video based on speech recognition remains a future technology.

The Basics - Page 2