Advantages of SMIL Technology (for developers)

Fluition allows you to take advantage of the latest communications technology now, without having to learn new technologies. Confluent Technologies has spent thousands of development hours over the last few years to perfect an easy to use tool that allows you to focus on creating and distributing your message using SMIL technology.

For developers, you may want to know that the underlying technology behind Fluition is SMIL, a W3C recommended specification that was designed to be a flexible markup language for delivering rich-media presentations. The open standard, rich-media components within SMIL offer many features and advantages over propietary technologies. The SMIL specification offers a number of significant benefits to the streaming rich-media industry.

Confluent Technologies has also developed a Fluition API. The Fluition API takes the engine from Fluition to allow the implementation of back-end server solutions that will create dynamic interactive media presentations on the fly. The Fluition API will also be incorporated into other media applications and technologies to allow for an interactive media development component to additional tools and rich-media applications. For more information contact Confluent Technologies at: [email protected]

Advantages include:

• Precise Presentation Layout Control
  SMIL presentations have several attributes that allow control over the layout of the presentation to be created. In addition to the overall layout attributes of the presentation, the media contained within a presentation is equally flexible.
• Flexible Media Placement
  By allowing the combination of various media types into a precisely laid out presentation, the design possibilities for SMIL developers are endless.
• Media Playback
  SMIL gives the creator the capability to synchronize timing for media playback within a presentation. During the playback of a video in one region, advertising or slides (for example) can be synchronized in another region and brought into the presentation at specific, designated time points to enhance advertising impact.
• Advanced Hyperlinking
  Linking to other related media including Web site content external of the presentation or other media within the presentation is possible with SMIL. Entire clips can be used for linking, or "hotspot" links can be inserted within media clips focusing on one or more particular points of interest in the clip. Timeline based linking is combined with hotspot linking in SMIL to create Anchors. Anchors are areas within a media clip that can link to other SMIL presentations or Web sites. An Anchor can appear at any point in the clip's timeline and can be any size of area contained within the clip.

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