Coincident TV Glee player It's way too early to tell what the endgame will be between Apple and Adobe — will interactive-video developers eventually migrate to HTML5, or will the iPhone and iPad remain hobbled by their lack of support for Flash content? But it's not too soon to see new products coming to market that seek to cross that gap.

One such technology is a platform in development from Coincident TV that allows HTML5-compatible interactive-video authoring. The company says savvy content creators can build a single interactive video experience, then easily re-skin it into different versions that will play in Flash-based browsers, on an iPad, or even on mobile devices.

The foundation is the company's Cue Point Language (CPL), an XML-based mark-up language that allows links to information, web pages, or even web services to be associated with different "cue points" specified in the video. Frames of video can be linked across the web in the same way that hypertext allows words and phrases to be linked.

"It's a new way to give video the respect it deserves," VP of Marketing Craig Barberich told StudioDaily. "It makes video the root of the experience, rather than text. Anything you can build in a web page, you can build over the top of the video." The company is currently showcasing its technology as it's used by Fox to enhance playback of episodes of Glee in what it calls the "Super Fan Experience." Once the (Flash-based) Coincident TV player has been launched, users can launch character bios from the Fox web site, jump directly to song performances in each episode, clickthrough to buy songs at iTunes or see info from sponsor Chevy, or even pop up a real-time Twitter stream showing references to the program.

It's all pretty slick — the worst part of the experience is the unskippable ad that pops up over and over, interrupting playback for more than 15 seconds even if you're just clicking around quickly from scene to scene.

Interactive web video is noting new, but Coincident.tv is hoping that cross-platform compatibility, combined with ease of use, will represent something new for content creators. Essentially, the CPL points to assets that could live locally or remotely in the same way HTML does, pulling them into the interactive experience. "We can utilize the HTML5 video tag, we can point to a Silverlight asset, or we can point to a Flash asset, and our experiences will play those back," Barberich explained. "One CTV file can be played multiple places, and it will dynamically re-adjust based on where it's being played. If it notices it's being played on an iPad, it will use an HTML5 tag and a codec that plays there. This is assuming that all those assets have been pointed to. But one interactive video file can play back in all the different browsers [or] on an iPad, and we have it running on Android devices."

"If you're going to author for the iPad and you want it to also play on a computer screen, there is a line to walk for design standards," adds Alex Beckman, VP of video production. "The iPad screen is 1024×768, so you don't want to make the experience too small or too big. But if you make a design that is neutral, it will play back the same on all devices."

The trick for Coincident TV will be convincing content owners to utilize its cross-platform capabilities. To date, the company has no iPad applications out in the field, although a tech demo [iPad only] is running on its web site. As a proof-of-concept, the company created an interactive video commercial for BMW that might play during an episode of ABC's Lost, allowing users to fiddle around with an car-selector tool and request more video clips before returning to the original program with frame-accuracy. This application is designed with the iPad's vertical orientation in mind, but it reformats itself gracefully if the device is turned to landscape mode, and also runs well in HTML5 in the Safari web browser.

Developers will want to do some extra work, of course, to make sure an iPad application makes use of touch-screen functionality, and that the plain-browser version works well with a mouse and keyboard. "You can keep the back-and-forth between assets the same and, because our architecture references a series of images [for a video's interactive control panel], just swap out the stills folder," says Beckman. "You don't have to re-do the whole thing. Just change the skin and it's iPad-ready or Flash-ready."

The authoring environment is pretty nifty, allowing content creators to specify that information should be pulled in automatically — stock-quote data could be overlayed on the screen in real time, for example — or fetching video directly from YouTube. "These are things people are building in Flash, but we offer an easy-to-use authoring tool," Barberich says. "Something that might have taken a week to design in another tool, you may be able to do in a day with ours."

Why take their word for it? The company is expanding its private beta program, so if this all sounds good to you, apply to become a beta-tester and see if you can put the system through its paces.