Elastic Charles[3] was a hypermedia journal developed between 1988 and 1989, in which annotations, called "micons", were placed inside a video, indicating links to other content.
It was a short soap opera program in which a viewer could click with an enhanced remote control on objects in the video to find information on how they could be purchased.
The company Watchpoint Media was formed to commercialize the technology involved, resulting in a product called Storyteller oriented towards interactive television.
in 1996 HyperCafe,[9] a popular experimental prototype of hypervideo, made use of this tool to create "narrative video spaces".
In 1997, the Israeli software firm Ephyx Technologies released a product called v-active,[10] one of the first commercial object-based authoring systems for hypervideo.
This technology was not a success though: Ephyx changed its name to Veon in 1999, at which time it shifted focus away from hypervideo to the provision of development tools for web and broadband content.
[11] Eline Technologies, founded in 1999, developed a hypervideo solution called VideoClix[12] that supports support QuickTime, Flash, MPEG-4 and HTML5 formats and has been used as a Software as a Service solution to distribute and monetize clickable video on the web and mobile devices on online video platforms such as Brightcove, ThePlatform, and Ooyala.
Many experiments (HyperCafe, HyperSoap) have not been extensively explored further, and authoring tools are currently only available from a small number of providers.
[citation needed] Smith et al. wrote in 2002 "Digital libraries are growing in popularity and scope, and video is an important component of such archives.
All major news services have vast video archives, valuable footage that would be of use in education, historical research, even entertainment"[1] Direct searching of pictures or videos, a much harder task than indexing and searching text, could be greatly improved by hypervideo methods.
Once the required nodes have been segmented and combined with the associated linking information, this metadata must be incorporated with the original video for playback.
[15] Furthermore, the creators of VideoClix emphasize the fact that its content plays back on standard players, such as Quicktime and Flash.