The Transmedia Video Player - Fresh from the French Orange R&D Oven

written by: Richard Kastelein

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Published on Tuesday, 20 September 2011 17:42

Fresh from the Oven at the Orange R&D unit...The transmedia player. That's what the claim is - and their tack on the player certainly takes a far different approach than most.

If your French is good, you can watch and listen to the video here - there are subtitles in English as well - though sometimes hard to read white text against a white background! So I have taken the liberty of transcribing some of it.

On a basic level - it provides complimentary information on the video you are watching. It might come from Wikipedia or another database. Or it could be information that will lead you to other videos or other video catalogues.

Yes, seen that, been there, done that. Snackable content. Works wonders!

So there are markers (tags) that take you from one video to the next - a bit like a trail of crumbs Hansel and Gretel Left behind them to find their way back - all within the video catalogue.

Now it's getting interesting. Love the metaphor. Really fits with the concept of transmedia and now starting to sound like something new!

This is aimed at consumers - as spectators - to help us have a video experience that is richer - moving from one video to the next.

Ah... moving from one video to the next. Wonder if they've been reading Robert Pratten? His work with the platform he built called Conductrr is revolutionary in the Transmedia world. In Conductrr you can set videos to lead on another video or other journey, once a number of views has been attained for instance. And trigger tweets around the experience...

One example they are currently using it for is a fictional video which they have attached a game - with the video on one side and clues on the other - within a stream of information being diffused by the player.

Now we are talking! Fusion of gaming and video makes for interesting fodder and can surely twist and test the creative mind with an infinite montage of angles and triggers.

Another project is the French Socialist Primaries - to guide viewers from one video to the next.  Where you say - start with a politician who addresses a key issue in minute three of the video - and from this topic - you can switch to other topics she is convering - or the same topic that other politicians are covering. Then you have all the info you need to compare.

Love this. Great example of how tagging can create brilliant semantic metadata that takes another view of what is both contextual and useful in a different way.

They interlink videos by using tags within the videos. The player then understands the tags. The backend allows for the uploader of the video to create the transmedia story tagging, adding contextual video, text (game mechanics etc) on the landscape and more..

Interesting. Kind of makes the rest of the 'players' out there look a bit legacy-ish.