Creating a Branching Experience

The Branching Experience allows you to quickly string together multiple videos and add annotations that let the viewer jump from video to video. This creates a "choose your own adventure" type experience for your viewers.

Working sample

The following video is an example of a Branching Experience. The first video (the "main menu") will loop until a choice is clicked. Clicking on text will branch to that video. When the video is complete, a time triggered action will jump back to the 6 second point of the first, "main menu" video.

Creating a new experience

Follow these steps to create a new Branching Experience:

1. Login to Video Cloud Studio.
2. Open the Interactivity module.
3. In the left navigation, click Experiences > All experiences.
4. Click New Experience.
5. Enter an Experience name.
6. In the list of experience types, click Branching.

   

7. Click Next .
8. Select one or more projects to add to the experience.
9. Click Next .
10. Confirm the experience settings and then click Create.

    

11. Confirm that the Annotation Editor opens with the first selected video displayed. All videos in the experience will be displayed below the preview player.

    

Click Add project to add more projects. To change the order of the videos, click Change play order and drag a video to a new position. To edit a video, click on a video thumbnail. To remove any video from the experience, hover over the video and click delete ().

Adding annotations

Typically, text, image or transparent overlays will be added to the "main menu" video that allow the viewer to branch from video to video.

1. For each "choice point", add a text, image or transparent overlay annotation. This is what the viewer will click on to jump to the different videos. Make sure the start time and duration for each of these annotations is identical.
2. Click Link > ACTIONS > Branch to video and select the video to link to.

   

3. Enter a Time to go to a specific point in the video. If no Time is entered, it will jump to the beginning of the destination video.
4. Click SUBMIT.
5. On one of the choice annotations, set Link > BEHAVIOR > Action to take if the viewer doesn't click to Loop back.

   This will cause the video to loop and display the "main menu" part of the video until one of the choices is clicked.

6. At the end of each branch, add a time triggered action and set the Branch to video time to jump to the appropriate place. In this example, the event is set to branch back to the "intro" video at the 6 second point.

   

Embedding and previewing an experience

In order to display an experience inside of a web page or application, embed code must be generated. You can also share a preview link or generate a dedicated landing page for an experience. For information, see Generating Embed Code for an Experience.

Configuring experience settings

The experience settings can be used to change the experience title, tags and to control the behavior of the experience. For information, see Creating and Managing Experiences.