Video in Interactive media 

This week we'll be looking at video in interactive media, how applications like advertisements and viral marketing work and their effect on consumers, how different platforms can implement video like the worldwide web e.g. YouTube, Daily motion etc. email attachments and even supermarket checkouts. 

Promotional material

Business marketing requires a sizeable amount of the business budget and creative thinkers who can effectively advertise the business value to many different consumers. Properly conducted, a marketing plan draws in new customers and creates loyalty among existing customers. One way a business increases profit through marketing is by using promotional materials to raise awareness of products, discounts and special services.

The promotional mix is the different types of promotional materials that a business uses for advertising. An adept business will use several different materials designed specifically to reach certain consumers. Posters, fliers, billboards, coupons and brochures are all examples of common promotional materials found in the mix.

• To be effective, promotional materials must be placed in spots where the target audience will see them. Billboards, for instance, are useful because they are visible to so many people. Posters must be placed in places that attract a similar audience to what the business is targeting. Many promotional materials such as coupons or brochures are available at point of sale, when the customer goes to the counter to make a purchase.

Traditionally, promotional materials are not often available in on line form (on line promotional activities cannot be disseminated in the same way, although email mailers are similar), but there are some exceptions. For instance, large suppliers often make promotional materials for discounts or new products available on line  Distributors can then print these materials and use them as hard copy posters or banners.

Advertisements

A video showing how the basic construction of an advert and it's effect and aims.

Successful advertising rarely succeeds through argument or calls to action. Instead, it creates positive memories and feelings that influence our behavior over time to encourage us to buy something at a later date. No one likes to think that they are easily influenced. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that we respond negatively to naked attempts at persuasion. 

Instead, the best advertisements are ingenious at leaving impressions.

Film trailers

The purpose of a film trailer is basically to make you want to see the movie, and there are a number of techniques that are employed in order to tantalize the viewer. They have to be executed within two and a half minutes, which is the limit imposed by cinemas.

A film trailer is a marvel in commercial editing. It relies on the use of scenes from the film, cut together to suggest the plot and the genre and to showcase the stars of the film. Music is also the major component to a trailer, whether it be a string-laden orchestral piece to highlight the drama of the story or sparse piano and silence like the trailer for Stanley Kubrick's film "Eyes Wide Shut." 

The music communicates emotion, in shorthand, because the trailer cannot give enough depth in its short amount of time. There is also sometimes a voice-over, which gives information in a very sensational tone, to entice the audience and fill them in on the emotional content.

The parts of the trailer as eluded to earlier, are the music and images from the film and sometimes the voice-over (though this isn't as widely used at this time) but also there are a few other pieces that are necessary to the trailer. First, there is the MPAA rating, which is either G, PG, PG-13, R or NC-17. 

This informs the viewer of things they may find objectionable and also gives a bit of insight about what kind of film it will be. Very often, the director, the writer and the actors are listed or introduced in a voice-over.

All these parts are assembled into a film trailer, to entice the viewer into wanting to watch the movie, whether it be for the plot, the talent involved or its rating, But most often, it's because of all these things combined.

Movie Marketing Strategies

The theatrical trailer is often the first chance to promote a movie to its target audience. Starting up to a year before the release of a major studio movie, distributors run movie trailers that are meticulously edited and audience-tested. The idea is to give moviegoers a taste of the laughs, special effects and plot twists of the studio's upcoming releases, while leaving them wanting more. It's an art form that's usually handled by special trailer production houses.

Viral marketing

This form of marketing or advertising generally tends to utilise social networks to quite a large extent, with regards to producing brand awareness, promoting a website or idea, or any number of marketing objectives. The idea behind it is that the marketing is self-replicating and spreads in a fashion similar to how a virus spreads, from person-to-person. Viral marketing can be spread by word-of-mouth or throughout the Internet, which is usually the more prominent and faster travelling method.

Items being promoted by a viral means might include: games, videos, entertaining articles, images (meme's) etc.

Viral marketing works on the principle that people will inform others of something they find amusing, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile of their time and then those people generally tend to tell other people and so on. The purpose of viral marketing is to attract a large amount of awareness to your website/business/brand and this awareness will turn into traffic and positive business for your site.

Examples of effective viral marketing:

LONDON - Cadbury's latest TV ad, in which two po-faced children sitting in a photographer's portrait studio make their eyebrows dance to a bleepy electro-funk track, has taken the internet by storm, with the confectionery company claiming it has been viewed 4m times.

The ad, which made its debut on January 23 during the 'Celebrity Big Brother' finale on Channel 4, has demonstrated the true "viral" nature of word-of-mouth and the internet.

A visit to YouTube shows that the "official" version of the ad has been viewed nearly 1.9m times -- given the numerous other uploads of the ad on YouTube alone and those appearing on other web video sites, Cadbury's claim of 4m may not be an exaggeration.

The ad, which was created by Fallon as part of a £3.7m campaign, has also drawn praise from some unlikely quarters. American rapper Kanye West has posted a link to the video on his blog; US celebrity blogger Perez Hilton described it as "super-cool"; and serial "Twitterer" Stephen Fry added to the fanfare on social networking site Twitter.

As if all that publicity were not enough, Cadbury has also partnered with mobile operator Orange (also a Fallon client) to give away the commercial's soundtrack as a mobile ringtone. This was downloaded 125,000 times in the first 11 days.

Games

Games consoles are one of the highest grossing digital products in the world, not only have they over time reached their next generation but they have completely changed gaming from it's roots going from a arcade cabinet to a multi purpose device that allows you to communicate with friends  through a socially interactive experience on-line via the web, it has applications too, for example the xbox now features netflix, an on-line service that in exchange for monthly payments chosen out of a set of contracted deals you can access movies either downloading to watch later or download as it streams to your console, giving the user a wider spectrum when using it as an interactive device, not only that but the xbox now features kinect, a camera device that scans ones body, creating a mimicked digital version of yourself on screen so you the player, have near full control of not only how to operate the console, but how and what you do in the game, even though this new technology has yet to be perfected it is the first step in new interactive technology. 

Worldwide web

The world wide web is full of interactive media, sites like YouTube for example are a massive on-line site that hosts billions of subscribers and viewers daily, but also has billions of uploads every day through user based content, some videos have an episodic theme, where links appearing on screen that prompt you to pick how the story can turn out, clicking either will automatically direct you to another video with the consequence you chose, involving the viewer and making any comedy or drama that much more inter active.

Sites like Facebook have huge viewers every day a lot like you tube, but Facebook is used for more social purposes, which has been expanded on more that's the simple comments section on you tube, it allows users to have a vast conversations on photo's, videos, private conversations, even small flash based games created by the community which has been published onto Facebook for other users to play and interact keeping the whole vibe of Facebook going.


Supermarket checkouts

In every local super market an new device has been made for the sole purpose of allowing shoppers to sort out their own purchases rather than waiting to be served at a till, these self checkouts, which are in Tesco's terms 'Fast Lanes' designed to speed up your process of shopping, despite the fact that they don't fully speed up the process of shopping they can have technical faults, and any items that require staff approval will pause the experience, the self checkout works by using a 'start' button, once pressed it will take you to a new screen where it shows you what is in your trolley at the end of your shop, and how much it will cost, any items you cannot pay for or eligible to buy will be removed, when preparing to pay, you press the 'finish and pay' button, this then takes you to the next screen which offers you multiple payment options, you select the one which you want to pay by, and you leave satisfied.


Mobile devices

As time has progressed mobile devices like phones have reached the digital age where they have in a short amount of time become multi platform devices capable of playing games in HD, having skype calls with someone across the globe via £G (internet provided by network provider) and being able to surf the web on the go and connect to wifi and do many tasks, online shopping, streaming videos, uploading pictures, talking on social websites etc.

most smart phones now have applications or apps, which are designed by companies whether they be professional or indie, professional companies, like skype, facebook, twitter provide social apps leading the market when communicating across the web and work just by touching the screen of your device, like an Iphone for example, it uses touch screen technology which is a basic application to all smart phones today, using either motion or heat sensitive sensors to translate a mouse like affect on the screen when typing or selecting apps, links and keys.

indie companies however are more focused on the gaming aspect of the device as the gaming industry has benefited from apps, like angry birds for example, a simple aim and shoot game with comical effects of cartoon birds attacking pigs, went viral and is now so popular their are special edition theme'd version such as angry birds in space, angry birds Rio  theme'd on the hit children's film Rio and it's highest achievement, angry birds star wars, which has entitled rights to mirror image the star wars universe in the angry birds style.

Technology

Lossy and lossless compression recap

The type of compression we've been discussing here is called lossless compression, because it lets you recreate the original file exactly. All lossless compression is based on the idea of breaking a file into a "smaller" form for transmission or storage and then putting it back together on the other end so it can be used again.

Lossy compression works very differently. These programs simply eliminate "unnecessary" bits of information, tailoring the file so that it is smaller. This type of compression is used a lot for reducing the file size of bitmap pictures, which tend to be fairly bulky. To see how this works, let's consider how your computer might compress a scanned photograph.

A lossless compression program can't do much with this type of file. While large parts of the picture may look the same -- the whole sky is blue, for example -- most of the individual pixels are a little bit different. To make this picture smaller without compromising the resolution, you have to change the colour value for certain pixels.

If the picture had a lot of blue sky, the program would pick one color of blue that could be used for every pixel. Then, the program rewrites the file so that the value for every sky pixel refers back to this information. If the compression scheme works well, you won't notice the change, but the file size will be significantly reduced.

Of course, with lossy compression, you can't get the original file back after it has been compressed. You're stuck with the compression program's reinterpretation of the original. For this reason, you can't use this sort of compression for anything that needs to be reproduced exactly, including software applications, databases and presidential inauguration speeches.

mpg.


MPG files contain video. You may see files with extensions of “.mpg” or “.mpeg”. There is no difference. MPG files are easily played with Windows Media Player and QuickTime on the Macintosh. 

Unlike AVI files, if you download an MPG file, you will always be able to just play it with no hassles. 

AVI files can be made with different codecs, so you often need to hunt down and install a codec before you can play an AVI.

MPG and MPEG files cannot contain viruses, so there is no harm in downloading them, or opening them if somebody emails you one.


mp4.

MP4 is a container format, meaning it is used to store audio and/or video data, rather than to code the information.  

MP4 video and audio can also be streamed over the internet.  This is also true of most other modern container formats.

Because MP4 is a container format, it does not have a standard method of coding the audio or video information.  Instead, codecs dictate how the audio or video will be coded and possibly compressed.  

It is about as braindead as AVI, but was much more popular due to the fact that it is an ISO standard, and was inherently linked to a compression scheme which was really good at that time. The format was, and is still used in Video CD's (VCD). 

The nice thing about this format is that it's an open standard. This means that playback is supported pretty much everywhere, although you need to pay a license to make an encoder.

mov.

The first versions were only available for Mac OS, but a Windows version soon followed. From the start on, QuickTime was quite advanced, with support for any amount of streams and multi-segmented files. Editing a movie is simple and intuitive. 

Later versions even allowed scripting and interactive features. I remember viewing (albeit very short) movies of Apollo launches and a heap of camel bones fusing into a skeleton, while on a PC the most exciting thing one could do was watching an animated GIF.

avi.


AVI is Microsoft’s video format. AVI is popular because it can take advantage of newer, and better compression schemes as they are developed. The data inside an AVI file can be compressed in many different ways. 

This is possible because AVI is designed to work with software called “codecs.” A codec decodes the compressed data into a movie. So, for example, if you have an AVI movie that was compressed with DIVX, Windows Media Player will use the DIVX codec to decompress the movie as it plays.

AVI’s flexibility is also a drawback because if you download an AVI file, you often can’t tell in advance if you will be able to play it. You may have to spend time hunting down and installing the proper codec.

QuickTime can play AVI’s on the Macintosh, but you still need the proper codecs. Mac users should keep in mind that the people who create AVI’s do so on Windows computers, and that sometimes the movies won’t play properly on the Mac.


wmv.

WMV is short for Windows Media Video. This video format was developed by Microsoft upon non-standard version of MPEG-4. But as WMV was standardized as an independent SMPTE standard and is considered to be a unique format now.

The video stream is often combined with an audio stream of Windows Media Audio. WMV deals with all types of video content. The advantage of the format it that it allows to compress large video files yet retaining considerably high quality. On-line radio stations use this format to deliver continuous flow of data.

WMV is similiar to ASF (Advanced Systems Format). In fact, WMV is often packed into ASF and the resulting file can be named .wmv or .asf. WMV can also be put in AVI container.

swf.

The .SWF Flash media container extension is one of the most popular available on the internet. SWF stands for Small Web File. .SWF was originally created as a file extension for Flash-based vector graphics and simple sequential animations and it used to stand for ShockWave Flash.

Later, the .SWF extension became more complex and now it is a dominant file format which contains all types of Flash media (including audio and video). 

The .SWF file can be used for showing Flash animation based on vector and raster graphics, for different forms of interaction with the end user - Flash menus, Flash buttons, Flashbanners, and more. Also, it can contain Flash applets which provide control for other Flash elements. For example, it can contain a Flash player applet which will provide advanced timeline and volume controls for a Flash-based .FLV movie clip.


3GGP.

3GPP, 3GPP2 are worldwide standards for the creation, delivery and playback of multimedia over 3rd generation, high-speed wireless networks. Defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 respectively, these standards seek to provide uniform delivery of rich multimedia over newly evolved, broadband mobile networks (3rd generation networks) to the latest multimedia-enabled wireless devices. Tailored to the unique requirements of mobile devices, 3GPP and 3GPP2 take advantage of MPEG-4, the standard for delivery of video and audio over the Internet.

Streaming

Progressive Download

Progressive Download is the most widely used video delivery method by far (in part because it's what YouTube uses). It's also easiest to implement: just put a video on your webserver and point your player to the URL. Once a user hits play, the player immediately starts downloading the file. The player will start video playback as soon as it has enough data to do so, but it will continue to download until it has received the whole file (hence the progressive).

Progressive Download is supported by Flash, HTML5 browsers, the iPad/iPhone and Android. On the server side, every regular webhoster supports downloads, as does every CDN (Content Delivery Network; webhosters that special in large-scale delivery). In most cases (Flash needs a small server module), it is possible to seek in a player to a not-yet-downloaded part of the video. At that point, the player re-downloads the video, starting at the seek offset instead of at the beginning. We call that feature pseudo-streaming.

The simplicity of Progressive Download also has its downsides. For one, bandwidth is wasted on data downloaded but not watched. Consider a user watching a ten minute video. They may leave the page after having watched only one minute of the video, but at that point the other nine minutes have already been downloaded. This means that the publisher has paid to transfer nine times as much data as the user actually watched - an expensive proposition on a large scale.

Another downside is the inability to change the quality of the video mid-stream: once the download starts, the video quality is locked. After switching a player to fullscreen, you generally see a blurry video, because it was intended to be watched at a much smaller size. Or, when you watch video on an iPad, your connection may switch from WiFi to 3G. Playback then stutters, because the download speeds are much lower on 3G.

In sum, Progressive Download works fine for short clips (a few minutes). For longer videos, the downsides start to impact playback too much. Plus, live streaming is not possible, as there's no downloadable file.

RTSP/RTMP Streaming

Because of the downsides of Progressive Download, RTMP/RTSP Streaming is widely used by professional media organizations like Hulu. This method uses specialized webservers that only deliver the frames of a video the user is currently watching. No data is downloaded in advance and data a user has seen is immediately discarded.

The most widely solution is used is RTMP (Real Time Streaming Protocol), the streaming protocol of Flash. It is supported by servers such as FMS and Wowza and most CDNs (but not by regular webhosters). HTML5 does not include a dedicated streaming protocol, nor does the iPad/iPhone. Android has support, for RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol). Unfortunately, RTSP is not widely supported by servers and CDNs.

This lack of support, especially on the server side, is the biggest drawback of RTMP/RTSP Streaming. Most publishers do not want to maintain expensive, dedicated servers to stream their videos. Additionally, the dedicated protocols (RTMP and RTSP) are often blocked by corporate firewalls.

On the plus side, RTMP streaming can change video quality mid-stream. This allows for optimal playback quality in the fullscreen and WiFi/3G scenarios described above. However, if the connection speed drops below the minimum bandwidth needed for the video, playback will be continuously interrupted. Unlike progressive download, users cannot pause a video and wait for enough data to download to ensure smooth playback.

In sum, RTMP/RTSP Streaming works great even for long-form or live video. It has specific server and protocol requirements, which makes it less accessible and adds significant complexity and cost as compared to Progressive Download.

Adaptive HTTP Streaming

Adaptive HTTP Streaming is a fairly new streaming format. It attempts to join the merits of RTMP/RTSP Streaming (bandwidth efficiency, quality switching) with those of Progressive Download (no special servers or protocol needed). Adaptive HTTP Streaming works by storing your videos on the server in small fragments (a few seconds each). The player then glues these fragments together into a continuous stream.

At present, Adaptive HTTP Streaming is supported by both Flash and the iPad/iPhone. Android supports it as of version 3 and support in HTML5, currently in development. Since Adaptive HTTP Streaming leverages standard webservers, it is supported by webhosters and CDNs alike.

Although Adaptive HTTP Streaming eliminates many of the downsides of RTMP/RTSP Streaming and Progressive Download, it still has issues of its own, the biggest being the lack of standardization. Because it is a new technology, there is no single, widely used implementing. The most popular is currently Apple's HLS (HTTP Live Stream), which is supported by the iPad/iPhone and Android 3.0. However, both Adobe and Microsoft have competing offerings (Zeri & Smooth) and the MPEG is working on DASH.

It's also worth noting that none of the Adaptive HTTP Streaming implementations work with regular MP4 files. They all require your files to be converted from a regular MP4 into a specific fragmented format. Apple, Microsoft and Adobe each supply a tool for this, but support for these formats doesn't exist in regular video editors and transcoding tools (yet).

In summary, while Adaptive HTTP Streaming will likely become the single video streaming method over time.

Media players

Quicktime

Quicktime media players are one of the standard formats that usually comes with any apple product since apple is none compatable with flash, they have their default media player as Quicktime.

Quicktime can be freely downloaded online and gives users the ability to play HD movies which they can download onto another device like an ipod or iphone, quicktime also being their default media player, quicktime can turn any device into a home cinema by giving you playable movies but also it plays media files, selecting specific song files and opening them with the program will allow you to listen to them on a constant stream.