EventStream: Interactivity Authoring That Works

Experts will tell you that interactive TV is "TV that you can interact with." And how do they define interactive streaming? "Streaming content with which you can interact." Those answers are so easy to shoot holes in that I could do it blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back while taking country and western line dancing lessons. That’s why I’m reviewing Media 100’s EventStream technology – it’s an actual product that I can test and measure.

EventStream allows you to author interactive commands into your video directly from your editing timeline. It is a component technology that Media 100 has embedded into many of its products, including CineStream, iFinish4, i100, and Cleaner 5 for both the Mac and Windows. For my testing, I used CineStream on Windows 2000 and Cleaner 5 on both Mac OS 9 and Windows 2000.

Good and Bad Events

Before you daydream about EventStream interactivity, you should know that the set of "events" that can be rendered differs for QuickTime, Real and Windows Media formats.

It’s no surprise that QuickTime supports all the EventStreams, as that format tends to be more mature when it comes to mixing media than the other two technologies. (Real’s SMIL puts it ahead of WMP in some respects. Internet Explorer has HTML+TIME, which supports much of SMIL, but WMP does not.)

The Cleaner 5 and CineStream manuals are very clear about what each EventStream does. Unfortunately, when it comes to the details of how it does them, how you can manipulate the output, or how to deliver them, the manuals are of little help.

Open URL

A typical use of the Open URL event would be to display a product description. For instance, while a speaker is talking about tennis shoes, you can build in the capability to trigger a Web browser to open a tennis shoes product page. When the speaker switches gears to talk about soft drinks, the browser page with tennis shoes can be told to Open URL to the soft drinks page. Only QuickTime can target specific frames or browser windows, but all three formats can bring up the URL in a browser every time (though it may not always be a browser-renderable URL, of course).