To coincide with the start of Global Entrepreneurship Week, on 14/11/11 Business Link, the UK government’s online resource for businesses, launched two major new online resources featuring video and e-learning content produced by Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals.

Creative technology specialist, Digital Surface Ltd, is very pleased to have helped out on the video player customisation aspect of this project. Jamie Gledhill of Digital Surface Ltd worked closely with Thomson Reuters and their London-based video production agency, Hub TV, delivering technical consultancy and production services.

The new Business Link resources are ‘My New Business’ and the ‘Growth and Improvement Service’, both of which leverage the Brightcove online video platform (OVP) to deliver high quality video experiences across multiple platforms.

A number of the video titles featured are highly interactive, promoting user engagement through calls to action embedded within and alongside the actual video content. User interaction dovetails with specially devised treatments making for a transparent learning experience.

In one content format,’Right Way Wrong Way’, video playback stops at a given point and the user is offered three choices. Two of the choices are wrong and after being played out lead the user back to the original decision point, the correct choice plays into the next ‘scene’ and subsequent decision points. The wrong choices illustrate common pitfalls and thus the user learns from the experience of being wrong as well as being right.

Another interactive format features ‘Jump Out’ options where during the course of video playback, the user can choose to investigate a subject in more detail by switching to detail-level content. Once the detail video has completed, the user is returned to the main content at the point they left off and playback resumes.

An additional player optimised for accessibility provides important enhancements such as subtitling, transcript download and audio-only version. This player is marked up with screen reader-compatible descriptions for each of the buttons and can be completely controlled by keyboard.

All of the players are designed to match the Business Link brand and even the ‘standard’ player is a breeze to use, being simple and stylish.

One would expect the video playback mechanics required to power the various user experiences described above to be fairly complex and time-consuming to develop. Not so! Because the project is based on the feature-rich Brightcove OVP, project development time was kept to a minimum with custom logic being conveniently packaged into easy to update modules referenced by the Brightcove player at run time.

Being a long-standing Brightcove Solution Partner with a deep knowledge of the Brightcove Player API and system architecture, Digital Surface Ltd is expert at developing innovative interactive video experiences based on the Brightcove OVP quickly and efficiently.

Take a look for yourself at the results.

A ‘Jump Out’ example can be found here and a ‘Right Way Wrong Way’ example here.

Tags: custom video player, digital surface, interactive video experience, technical consultancy