Interlude’s Parallel Video Feature Gives You A Cool Way To Combine Clips, Channel Surfing Style

Hey, remember that interactive video for Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” that came out last fall? You know, the one that allowed you to switch between 16 faux TV channels on the fly, each of them lip syncing to what is arguably the greatest song of all-time?

Well, Interlude, the startup that created the technology behind the Dylan video, is now making these capabilities available to all users of its Treehouse product.

Treehouse has been a tool for creating “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style videos, where viewers can choose from multiple options to determine the path that a video takes. (We worked with Interlude to create an interactive episode of “Founder Stories”, where viewers can decide what question they want founder Yoni Bloch to answer.)

The idea behind the Parallel Video feature is a little different — instead of branching choices, you get a number of clips (audio and video) running in at once, and the ability to switch between them at any time. As another example, there’s this Lincoln-sponsored, interactive version of Aloe Blacc’s video for his song “Love Is The Answer”.

Matan Ariel, the company’s director of business development, told me that parallel videos were previously created as custom campaigns for individual clients. However, it became clear that there was broader interest (in fact, some Interlude users already have been trying to hack the product’s existing features to make this kind of thing possible), so the team decided to build this into Treehouse itself.

Ariel gave me a quick demo of how someone could create their own version of the Aloe Blacc video in Treehouse, and it took only a few minutes. (Of course, you need to start by creating multiple videos that do actually run in parallel.) You can see a demo of the platform in the video below.

What’s may be a little harder to wrap your mind around is that Interlude’s two main forms of interactivity can now be combined — so you could have several clips running in parallel, and then force users to choose one specific branch of the story.

[vimeo 101126342 w=500 h=282]

3 Elevators Project from Interlude on Vimeo.