There are several varying platforms in which video is utilised interactively, for example:
- The World Wide Web
- Gaming Consoles (Xbox Live Dashboard, Wii marketplace)
- Mobile Phones
- Music Players (MP4, iPod etc)
- DVD Menus
- Digital Television
The biggest source of video used in Interactive Media is the internet.
Thousands of website pages contain video in some form or another, and some websites exist solely for video-utilising purposes. A perfect example of this is YouTube.
YouTube is an extremely popular website that hosts a wide variety of videos, most of which are posted by the website users themselves.
The website is classed as Interactive Media as the users can interact with the various links on the website itself to find a video they want, or use the search bar to find something specific they would like to see.
What also makes this website interactive media is the ability to pause and play the video, as well as the ability to move it to a point you would like to watch the video from.
Besides these options and the option to control the volume of the video, there are also some extra features the website has provided to enrich the user's experience while watching the video. These features can include watching the video in full screen (which is not commonly used due to the reduction in quality, as the video is already at a set quality once it is recorded), watching the video in High definition (again, this depends on the quality of the video, if there is a higher quality recording device in use this would be better to use as it will be clearer for the user to see, and it will help to boost the amount of views the user's video post will get), and watching the video with captions, which are added by the user over the video after it has been uploaded to the website's server.
3D videos:
An additional feature that YouTube has newly released is the option of watching videos 3-dimensionally. This would require the appropriate recording equipment to take 3D videos on the user's part, and they are given the option to make the video 3-Dimensional as they upload the video. There are different formats for viewing these videos, for example with various colours of 3D glasses (Red/Cyan, Amber/Blue, Green/Magenta) or the 'Cross-eyed' option, prompting the watcher to 'cross' their eyes in order to see a middle, 3-Dimensional image between the two that are displayed onscreen.
YouTube uses its own company-created embedded player on the website for the videos to play on. The videos are viewed using Adobe Flash Player, with JavaScript enabled on the internet browser.
The disadvantage of using Flash Player to play the website's videos is that the player must be downloaded first in order for the user to see any video clips. This can be a problem with a computer with a small amount of memory, or a computer using an older Operating System, for example. Even if it is possible for the computer to download and install the program, the videos may load slowly in comparison to a computer with more memory or a more modern OS.
YouTube's videos can not only be watched on the official website, but they can also be embedded on other websites (e.g. forums and personal webpages), and there is also the option to 'share' the video you have loaded via Social Networking websites such as Facebook.
Again, this could be problematic if visitors to the page do not have Flash Player installed or JavaScript enabled.
This problem could be solved by creating a non-flash player (as tested by competing video player website Dailymotion using HTML5 instead of plus-ins such as Flash) for the videos, so that users would not have to install anything in order to access the videos they want.
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