Chuck Hudson, co-author of "HTML5 Developer's Cookbook," was recently at the Streaming Media West Conference held in Huntington Beach, Calif. Here, he instructed a class on adding interactivity to videos, which also included subjects on how to make hotspots, capture user input, add overlays, control the video timeline, insert subtitles, work with mobile devices, and offer localized content.

"What we've come to talk about is making HTML5 — the video tag (News – Alert) — interactive," Hudson began. "The video tag has provided a great means for us to embed video in different sources and such, and the assumption here is you may have played with at least a video tag, and you know how to at least play a video in there. But we're going to take that further."

"We really want to create an engaging experience that could include overlays on top of the video element. It could be controlling the timeline itself of the video. There's some neat things that we'll do with that," Hudson said. "Using subtitles and leveraging those subtitles to engage the user that much more, especially if we're doing localizable content, streaming video around the world. We're going to use Track meta tags, as well, and we're going to leverage those for some really interesting solutions where we can get into things like JSON object notation and start leveraging that for even more detailed data and information on these timelines of the video tag."

Chuck Hudson has developed mobile web and mobile solutions since the 1990s. A successful “techpreneur” and long-time geek-in-training, he is a certified PHP programmer and PayPal (News – Alert) developer. He teaches web programming, mobile technology, and entrepreneurship throughout the Boston and Atlanta regions. In 2008, he received the eBay Star Developer award for the first iPhone (News – Alert) mobile web and native apps.