It wasn’t that long ago that video online was a new thing and now it seems to be everywhere from proffessional content all the way through to the user gernerated stuff on YouTube. The reasons for the rise in popularity of video online are numerous  but one that stands out stong and clear is ‘engaging content’. Video keeps readers interested and interested viewers tend to stick around for longer. Now though the time has come to add a little more interactivity to your videos allowing your viewers to interact directly with the video content that you offer them.

and how do you do this?

Cue Points!

The ability to add cue points to video has been around for quite some time time but the process has always been fairly complicated and restricted to developers that are familiar with action script. The fundamental concept centres around the placement of ‘cue points within a .flv file that then bring about certain actions via an action script command. For example you can have overlay adverts appear at certain points during a video when certain products are mentioned or create hot spots on the video itself. As I mentioned though, up until now to create these kind of interactive videos you would need to have a fairly good knowledge of Action script and Flash but now thanks to those clever boys over at flash loaded there is a component that makes the whole process so much easier.

hotflashvideo is a video component for Flash that takes away all of the complicated Action script side of creating interactive videos. Once installed in Flash you can select an .flv file and set about easily adding hot spots to your video via the very clever overlay tool. The component does cost $70 but if you are producing a product for a client or intend to create a few interactive videos in the future it is great value for money and a great time saving tool.