EventStream: Interactivity Authoring That Works

Hot spots allow you to specify what events will happen when the user clicks on a predefined player screen area (the hot spot). There are five hot spot functions in EventStream, of which QuickTime supports all five, and Real supports three. WMP has no hot spot support.

The events that can be triggered by clicking on the hot spots are Go to Time, Open URL, Pause, Play, and Replace movie. All of these are available to QuickTime, and most to Real.

An important difference between EventStream’s functionality in Cleaner 5 versus its implementation in CineStream is that with CineStream, you can use the timeline to move and resize hot spots through time. This means that if you are patient enough to do the key framing, you can have a hot spot that follows something in particular on the screen, as in the "click on Buffy’s jacket to buy it while she’s slaying vampires" example.

Replace Movie

Replace Movie does what you’d expect — it replaces the current movie on the screen with a different movie. You can create DVD-like navigation for streaming content on the Web by (1) associating a Replace Movie action with a hot spot in a main menu movie, (2) launching a selected movie when a user clicks the hot spot, and then (3) inserting a Replace Movie event at the end of the clicked movie to return the user to the main menu movie. I’ve created a small example to demonstrate the concept with a two-option main menu at www.streamingmedia.com/reviews/es01.

Use of Replace Movie can blossom in creative ways. For example, this would be an excellent way to build a "choose your own adventure" story or a streaming product catalog (assuming you have video of your products), or to find new ways for users to interact.

Go To Time works pretty much just like Replace Movie except that it uses whatever movie is currently playing and jumps to that time point.