Video on the Web: Experiences from SMIL and from the Ambulant Annotator

Since the arrival of YouTube on the desktop, video has entered its second lifetime on the Web. The main difference between this incarnation of video and its predecessors is at the source: where first generation video was about repurposing content, the YouTube generation is all about usergenerated content and few-to-few (rather than one-to-many) sharing. The fact that video is not new to the Web is a great advantage. It means that much of the work from the past can be reused and updated to meet current needs. This paper provides an overview of how video (and audio) have been processed on the Web using SMIL. It also provides a discussion of some extensions to SMIL functionality that show how video is processed as a first-class object in a video interaction framework within the Ambulant Annotator.