Hypervideo

Hypervideo, or hyperlinked video, is a displayed video stream that contains embedded, user clickable anchors, allowing navigation between video and other hypermedia elements. Hypervideo is thus analogous to hypertext, which allows a reader to click on a word in one document and retrieve information from another document, or from another place in the same document. That is, hypervideo combines video with a non linear information structure, allowing a user to make choices based on the content of the video and the user's interests.

A crucial difference between hypervideo and hypertext is the element of time. Text is normally static, while a video is necessarily dynamic; the content of the video changes with time. Consequently, hypervideo has different technical, aesthetic, and rhetorical requirements than a static hypertext page. For example, hypervideo might involve the creation of a link from an object in a video that is visible for only a certain duration. It is therefore necessary to segment the video appropriately and add the metadata required to link from frames - or even objects - in a video to the pertinent information in other media forms.

History of Hypervideo

Illustrating the natural progression to hypervideo from hypertext, the software Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment, employs a spatial metaphor for displaying links. Storyspace utilizes 'writing spaces', generic containers for content, which link to other writing spaces. HyperCafe, a popular experimental prototype of hypervideo, made use of this tool to create "narrative video spaces". HyperCafe was developed as an early model of a hypervideo system, placing users in a virtual cafe where the user dynamically interacts with the video to follow different conversations.

Video to video linking was demonstrated by the Interactive Cinema Group at the MIT Media Lab. Elastic Charles was a hypermedia journal developed between 1988 and 1989, in which "micons" were placed inside a video, indicating links to other content. When implementing the Interactive Kon-Tiki Museum, Listol used micons in order to represent video footnotes. Video footnotes were a deliberate extension of the literary footnote applied to annotating video, thereby providing continuity between traditional text and early hypervideo. In 1993, Hirata et al. considered media based navigation for hypermedia systems, where the same type of media is used as a query as for the media to be retrieved. For example, a part of an image (defined by shape, or color, for example) could link to a related image. In this approach, the content of the video becomes the basis of forming the links to other related content.

HotVideo was an implementation of this kind of hypervideo, developed at IBM's China Research Laboratory in 1996. Navigation to associated resources was accomplished by clicking on a dynamic object in a video. In 1997, a student project at the MIT Media Lab called Hypersoap further developed this concept. HyperSoap was a short soap opera program in which a viewer could click with an enhanced remote control on objects in the video to find information on how they could be purchased. The company Watchpoint Media was formed in order to commercialize the technology involved, resulting in product called Storyteller, oriented towards interactive television. Watchpoint Media was acquired by Goldpocket in 2003, which was in turn acquired by Tandberg Television in late 2005.

In 1997, the Israeli software firm Ephyx Technologies released a product called v-active, one of the first commercial object based authoring system for hypervideo. This technology was not a success, however; Ephyx changed its name to Veon in 1999, at which time it shifted focus away from hypervideo to the provision of development tools for web and broadband content.

eline Technologies, founded in 1999, developed the first viable hypervideo solutions called VideoClix. Today VideoClix is the most widely used SaaS (Software as a Service) solution to distribute and monetize clickable video on the web and mobile devices. With the advantage that its videos can play back in popular video players such as QuickTime and Flash as well as multiple OVPs (online video platforms) such as Brightcove, ThePlatform and Ooyala. VideoClix also offers technology that can be integrated into any 3rd party players based on Quicktime, Flash, Mpeg4 and HTML5. this product has proven to be a commercial success. In 2006, eline Technologies was acquired by VideoClix Inc. VideoClix client base include Disney, ESPN, MTV networks, Dailymotion, Revision 3 as well as Brands such as Apple, Kraft, Fruit of the loom and many others.

In 2010, Coincident TV launched it hypervideo platform that plays on both HTML5 and Flash devices across multiple media devices, including laptop, mobile, and iPad. Coincident TV technology plays back in common video players found in CDN (Content Delivery Networks) or OVP's (online video platforms) such as Brightcove, The Platform, and Akamai. The tool incorporate traditional media types such as Quicktime, Flash, MPEG4, and HTML5 videos, as well as PNG, JPG, SWF, GIF graphic files into the player during playback. Clients include FOX, MTV, Fox Sports North, Audi, among others.

wireWAX, also offers a hypervideo authoring tool. With this tool user selects a person or object to 'tag' and it is then automatically tracked in real-time by a series of algorithms. The accuracy of the tracking may vary depending on video, object movement, color spectrum..etc. The hotspot can then be customized and further information can be attached by the user.

Concepts and Technical Challenges

Hypervideo is challenging, compared to hyperlinked text, due to the unique difficulty video presents in node segmentation; that is, separating a video into algorithmically identifiable, linkable content.

Video, at its most basic, is a time sequence of images, which are in turn simply two dimensional arrays of color information. In order to segment a video into meaningful pieces (objects in images, or scenes within videos), it is necessary to provide a context, both in space and time, to extract meaningful elements from this image sequence. Humans are naturally able to perform this task; however, developing a method to achieve this automatically (or by algorithm) is a complex problem.

And it is desirable to do this algorithmically. At an NTSC frame rate of 30 frames per second, even a short video of 30 seconds comprises 900 frames. The identification of distinct video elements would be a tedious task if human intervention were required for every frame. Clearly, even for moderate amounts of video material, manual segmentation is unrealistic.

From the standpoint of time, the smallest unit of a video is the frame (the finest time granularity). Node segmentation could be performed at the frame level - a straightforward task as a frame is easily identifiable. However, a single frame cannot contain video information, since videos are necessarily dynamic. Analogously, a single word separated from a text does not convey meaning. Thus it is necessary to consider the scene, which is the next level of temporal organization. A scene can be defined as the minimum sequential set of frames that conveys meaning. This is an important concept for hypervideo, as one might wish a hypervideo link to be active throughout one scene, though not in the next. Scene granularity is therefore natural in the creation of hypervideo. Consequently, hypervideo requires algorithms capable of detecting scene transitions.

Of course, one can imagine coarser levels of temporal organization. Scenes can be grouped together to form a narrative sequence, which in turn are grouped to form a video; from the point of view of node segmentation, these concepts are not as critical. Issues of time in hypervideo were considered extensively in the creation of the HyperCafe.

Even if the frame is the smallest time unit, one can still spatially segment a video at a sub-frame level, separating the frame image into its constituent objects; this is necessary when performing node segmentation at the object level. Time introduces complexity in this case also, for even after an object is differentiated in one frame, it is usually necessary to follow the same object through a sequence of frames. This process, known as object tracking, is essential to the creation of links from objects in videos. Spatial segmentation of object can be achieved, for example, through the use of intensity gradients to detect edges, color histograms to match regions, motion detection, or a combination of these and other methods.

Once the required nodes have been segmented and combined with the associated linking information, this metadata must be incorporated with the original video for playback. The metadata is placed conceptually in layers, or tracks, on top of the video; this layered structure is then presented to the user for viewing and interaction. Thus the display technology, the hypervideo player, should not be neglected when creating hypervideo content. For example, efficiency can be gained by storing the geometry of areas associated with tracked objects only in certain keyframes, and allowing the player to interpolate between these keyframes, as developed for HotVideo by IBM. Furthermore, the creators of VideoClix emphasize the fact that its content plays back on standard players, such as Quicktime and Flash. When one considers that the Flash player alone is installed on over 98% of internet enabled desktops in mature markets, this a perhaps a reason for the success of this product in the current arena.

Hypervideo authoring tools

The process of creating hypervideo content is known as authoring. For a variety or reasons many early attempts at creating distributed authoring tools were not successful except VideoClix. This field is currently enjoying a resurgence of interest, perhaps due to the greater availability of broadband internet and more robust media players.

VideoClix, is prominent in the rapidly growing domain of internet video. Its end-to-end solution is the industry de-facto for creating, managing, distributing, monetizing, syndicating and measuring hypervideo. It's one of the most battle hardened tools in the industry and is being used by many Tier-1 companies such as Viacom, Disney, Kraft, Apple and many others.

Tandberg Television, specializing in interactive television solutions, has a hypervideo system called AdPoint for video-on-demand. They also sell Storyteller, a product derived from the MIT project Hypersoap. This tool, although impressive as a university lab project, has proven to be very cumbersome to use in the industry.

ADIVI (Add Digital Information to VIdeo) is a hypervideo and rich media application, which provides the functionality to annotate videos, pictures, text, links and other file formats like .pdf, .doc and .xls to any flv video. The application is mainly focused on training, service, assembly and production issues and includes tools for collaborative work and documentation.

Klickable provides a simple web based tool to annotate videos. Klickable technology allows content publishers to create hotspots within the video, add a photo and link to wherever they choose. Klickable videos, create a more engaged user, a comprehensive publishing experience and targeted contextual advertising.

Overlay.TV provides a set of interactive tools available in a online toolset for creating hypervideo using text, images, transparent links, video-in-video and clipart. Their free-form creative approach lets designers or video artists create freely on the interactive canvas from a design perspective, but also ties product placement from retailers into the workflow as a mechanism for directing clicks from specific products in a video to the retailers that carry that product.

Adobe Flash, a popular multimedia authoring program widely used to create animated web content, can also be used to create hypervideo content. As Flash was not designed as a hypervideo authoring tool, creating such content can be difficult using Flash alone. Such added functionality has been provided through outside software in the past - for example, MoVideo and Digital Lava. However, these products are no longer sold.

wireWAX is a video tool that allows the user to upload and add hyperlinks or 'tags' to their own videos. The developers claim that it is the world's first 'taggable' video platform and has an integrated object tracking engine that can track the movements of people or objects automatically.

Riva Producer is a software that is especially designed to reduce production costs of non-linear video navigation. Therefore it is suitable to replace industrial documentation by utility films.

In the past, there have been a number of attempts to market hypervideo authoring software that is no longer available. MediaLoom, a product based on a Masters of Science project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was an early hypervideo authoring tool. It used the Storyspace hypertext authoring environment to generate script files for the hypervideo engine of the HyperCafe. This product reached prototype stage, but was not commercially successful. Ephyx Technologies created v-active, the first authoring software using dynamically tracked objects in video. The company moved away from hypervideo, however, when it became Veon in 1999.

Hypervideo can also be created using services provided by firms with proprietary methods, such as those provided by Vimation. However, this company does not licence its authoring software.

The rise of hypervideo

As the first steps in hypervideo were taken in the late 1980s, it would appear that hypervideo is taking unexpectedly long to realize its potential. Many interesting experiments (HyperCafe, HyperSoap) have not been extensively followed up on, and authoring tools are at the moment available from only a small number of providers.

However, perhaps with the wider availability of broadband internet, this situation is rapidly changing. Interest in hypervideo is increasing, as reflected in popular blogs on the subject, as well as the extraordinary rise of the internet phenomenon YouTube. Furthermore, by 2010, some estimates have internet downloads claiming over one third of the market for on-demand video.

As the amount of video content increases and becomes available on the internet, the possibilities for linking video increase even faster. Digital libraries are constantly growing, of which video is an important part. News outlets have amassed vast video archives, which could be useful in education and historical research. Direct searching of pictures or videos, a much harder task then indexing and searching text, could be greatly facilited by hypervideo methods.

Commentary

User replies to video content, traditionally in the form of text or image links which are not embedded into the playback sequence of the video, have been allowed through such video hosting services as Viddler to become embedded both within the imagery of the video and within portions of the playback (via selected time lengths inside the Progress slider element); this feature has become known as "video comments" or "audio comments".

Commercial exploitation

Perhaps the most significant consequence of hypervideo will result from commercial advertising. Devising a business model to monetize video has proven notoriously difficult. The application of traditional advertising methods - for example introducing ads into video - is likely to be rejected by the online community, while revenue from selling advertising on video sharing sites has so far not been promising.

Hypervideo offers an alternate way to monetize video, allowing for the possibility of creating video clips where objects link to advertising or e-commerce sites, or provide more information about particular products. This new model of advertising is less intrusive, only displaying advertising information when the user makes the choice by clicking on an object in a video. And since it is the user who has requested the product information, this type of advertising is better targeted and likely to be more effective.

Ultimately as hypervideo content proliferates on the Internet, particularly content targeted for delivery via the television set, one can imagine an interlinked web of hypervideo forming in much the same way as the hypertext based World Wide Web has formed. This hypervideo based "Web of Televisions" or "TeleWeb" would offer the same browsing and information mining power of the Web, but be more suited to the viewing experience of being 10 feet from the screen on the living room couch than the Web is. Here may form an environment of not only interactive ads, but also one of interactive and nonlinear news, information, and even story telling.

The future of hypervideo

The above mentioned "Web of Televisions" or "TeleWeb" concepts are likely to become widely adopted as implemented by future advanced Set-Top-Box and Game-Box units with the ability to provide both the 10 foot TV and 2 foot Web experience. The addition of a wireless display and remote control ties together Web and TV, in this scenario clicking objects is non disruptive to movies and TV shows. The full screen video display provides the 10 foot video experience while supplemental content, commerce and advertising related to clicking video objects is placed on the additional display and remote control unit that provides the 2 foot PC experience.

Further reading

• From hypertext to hypervideo
• A Picture of Hypervideo Today
• U.S. Patent 6462754
• Technical Report TR02-017 UNC Chapel Hill

External links

• VideoClix
• Storyspace
• wireWAX