About
New to Interactive Video Paths? This article introduces the key planning concepts and best practices to help you create engaging interactive experiences and avoid common pitfalls.
Plan your video
Unlike a traditional video, interactive videos aren’t watched from start to finish. Viewers choose their path, and planning that journey is key to keeping them engaged.
Tips for planning your structure
- Use the node map as a planning space - Drag in empty nodes and sketch out your potential paths.
- Limit the number of connections per node - To avoid overwhelming viewers, we recommend no more than five outgoing paths per node.
- Think like your viewer - What kind of experience should they have? Where might they get lost or distracted?
Build an engaging experience
The way you structure your content will shape how your audience engages.
Tips for building your content
- Keep it short - Each video node should be no more than 60 seconds to hold attention.
- Hook them early - Add the first interaction (hotspot) within the first 30 seconds.
- Don’t show buttons too soon - Once a button appears, it’s clickable. Make sure key content is seen before it shows up.
- Use a menu - Give viewers a way to jump back to the main menu or reorient themselves.
- Add subtle movement - Once interactive buttons appear, keep the background alive with gentle motion (nothing too distracting).
- Auto-direct when needed - You can create nodes that auto-play. Use a visible timer so viewers know what to expect.
- Smooth the transitions - To avoid jump cuts between videos, time node switches to natural scene changes, or shift the camera angle.
Optimize playback performance
Interactive videos rely on preloading content to work smoothly. These tips help with that:
- Allow 10 seconds of buffer before buttons appear when linking to multiple nodes. This gives the player time to load target videos.
- Control which node loads first. If one path is more likely to be chosen, make it appear slightly earlier (even by milliseconds) so it loads first.
To fine-tune button timing, disable the snap tool so you can adjust appearance times more precisely.
Accessibility and captions
If you're using captions, make sure they're enabled before you add the video to your interactive project.
- Use the Display on Player setting in the captions editor.
- If this wasn’t set beforehand, the captions might not appear in your final project.
For more details, see our article Upload and manage captions in Rich Media CMS.
Understand thumbnail behavior
The thumbnail for an interactive video is automatically set to the beginning of the first node.
At this time, thumbnails can’t be customized.
