How To Add User Interaction To Your Videos – Part 2

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A short time ago I did a post and demonstration video about how to add user interaction to your videos in YouTube (by user interaction, I mean making objects within your video clickable by the viewer).

But what if you don’t want to put your video on YouTube…yet you’d still like to take advantage of these new user interaction features?

Well, there are actually a number of options available out there these days…some good, some not so good.  One of the more interesting ones was recently brought to my attention by a student of mine (thanks Doug).

It’s called Veeple.  And it allows you to add all sorts of “clickable things” within your videos.  Videos that you can host on your own site or blog.  What’s more, until March 2009, the service is 100% free.

If you’re at all interested in adding some user interaction to your videos, Veeple is something you’ll definitely want to check out.  You can visit their site here.

One word of caution though.  What you need to understand about “clickable areas” in your video is that your actual video file is not being altered (FLV files can’t be “programmed”).  Rather, the player that your video appears in is providing all of these clickable actions

That means your video must always be played inside that specific player (the Veeple player for example)…if you take the same video and upload it to a sharing site or use it with a different video player, you will not have any of the user interactivity options.

That’s a point that often confuses people, so I wanted to clarify it; it’s not your video that has the interactivity, it’s the video player making it appear that way.

 

 

 

1 comment

  • Hey Dave,

    Thanks for the post today on Veeple. I am VP of content at Veeple and we are excited to see the response we are getting on our interactivity. You are right in that the interactivity is not “embedded” into the video but rather acts like a piece of cellophane that wraps over the video and is “activated” when used through our player. The cool thing is that it will work with any site or blog that allows embedding of the video code, which is quite prevalent these days, and growing quickly. Or main customer is the web publisher who uses video on their own site or blog. Here is a “real-world” example from one of our customer’s site (just click on the video):

    http://pacifichealingarts.com/book_description.php

    It is also much deeper than YouTube’s interactivity as it launches in-screen Info Panels when you click on an object or you can launch to an external website of your choice.

    Thanks again for the post!