Re: Networked Video in 10 Years : Networked Video == Parseable Video | Not sLop

Interesting, I just got some comment spam on this post from January 2007: Networked Video in 10 Years : Networked Video == Parseable Video | Not sLop.

In the post, I describe the proceedings from a breakout group at that year’s Beyond Broadcast conference.  My conclusion was that online video needs to be more than just video online, that it needs to be parseable (indexed and hyper-linkable and so on).

Unfortunately, for the most part, online video now, is pretty much the same as it was then.  Typically it exists on a web server as a file, is embedded in a web page with a bit of textual information around it and that’s it.  Not a lot of interactivity or time based meta-data as part of it.  Certainly not parseable in the way described in the post.  No easy way to link to specific content or to associate content on the page with any particular point in time in the video.

Fortunately, while that is still mostly the case, it isn’t always the case.  The good folks at Mozilla have been working on an open source JavaScript library called Popcorn.js that allows any time based media (audio/video) to execute code, manipulate a page, display other content and so on.   They have even created a GUI interface so you don’t have to be a JavaScript programmer in order to take advantage.  Nice!

I spent last week, during ITP’s Teach Yourself JavaScript Together, getting familiar with Popcorn and then gave a workshop that showed it (as part of an overall HTML5/JavaScript media workshop).  If you are interested, here is the talk (jump in a little more than 2 minutes):

YouTube Link and the notes are here.

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