This posting will reintroduce the concept of Hyper-video, the subject of a series of forthcoming videos.
The concept of HyperVideo is most easily explained by a series of examples.
You are watching the news and the anchor person says “Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, today announced…” you click on the question mark on the screen and are presented with a menu:
- Zimbabwe History (Web link)
- Zimbabwe Government and Politics (Article)
- President Mugabe Biography (Video)
- Go to Wikipedia/Zimbabwe
- You are watching a video on how to use a Silverlight Toolkit control and you realize that you don’t know how to install the Toolkit. You click on Help — the video pauses and a second video opens that provides the background information you need.
- You are watching a HR training video and the person in the video mentions investing in a 401K. The word 401K appears on the screen and when you click on it, the first video pauses and a second video begins detailing your retirement plan options. But here’s the kicker: the supplemental video you are seeing is quite different from the 401K video your manager would see. The system chooses which video to display based your management level and years of service.
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Much to Explore
Building hypervideo will cause us to consider a number of interesting aspects of Silverlight and related technologies.
As a start, 
Expression Encoder can simplify creating the “markers” in the video.
The Media Element (or a control derived from the Media Element) will fire an event each time a marker is encountered. There are numerous traditional and non-traditional ways to respond to that event. 
Encoder will also create a working player to get us started.
At its heart, the player is a control or a set of controls that can be skinned to change its appearance and can be subclassed to change its behavior
Interpretation of the markers can be decoupled from the type or name of the markers, and can be data driven based on information obtained (e.g.,) through a web service
Note that for complete decoupling, markers can be injected into the video at run time, rather than permanently encoded into the video.
Whither Hypervideo?
I am reminded that the value of hypertext was not fully realized for quite a while after it was first introduced. (Wikipedia estimates that it was at least 20 years from invention to widespread use). It will be interesting to see if hypervideo turns out to have lasting value or is yet another technology in search of a need.
More: Hypervideo – Continuing the Dialog
