I’ve just watched a tech talk session about media playback on Apple TV.

There were some interesting uses of HLS. The video player has a sliding thumbnail view, which uses I-frame playlists, that allows viewers to seek to a specific point in the video, and there are some additional properties for displaying metadata about the video, such as chapter markers and interstitial content, but what was particularly interesting was the integration with Siri. In the presentation, the presenter pauses the video and asks Siri what the character in the video just said. This caused the video to seek backwards for 15 seconds and enable the subtitles (temporarily) for that part of the video. After 15 seconds, the subtitles were turned off. A novel use of subtitles!

It’s given me a few ideas for some new content for the book. (Looks like I’ll have to get myself an Apple TV now!)

Check it out if you have the time. It’s worth watching.