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Working with British start-up Coull, Universal Music is experimenting with an idea that's had a decidedly mixed response on interactive TV services. Starting with British bands Girls Aloud, Busted and Razorlight, the label is creating a series of interactive music videos for Internet play, hoping to use them as direct ways to sell albums, tickets and other band-related merchandise.
"Fans are very familiar with hyperlinks," Rob Wells, Universal Music's director of new media, said in a statement. "Using Coull's (technology) we can now give them the same kind of interaction in a video program, which is a major breakthrough."
The Coull technology, and its first embodiment in next week's single from girl group Girls Aloud, is realizing one of the Web's most persistent--and so far elusive--visions for digital video.
Much of the periodic resurgence of interest in interactive television is grounded by companies' desire to sell products or services directly inside TV shows. But this kind of hyperlinked TV programming , provided by companies such as OpenTV, hasn't been tremendously successful.
Technologists have looked for a variety of ways to make Internet video directly interactive as well. The MPEG-4 multimedia specification has for years contained a standard way to create patches of video that act as independent objects, so they can be clickable or treated differently than the video around them.
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