I was looking around on the Apple QuickTime - What’s On for some innovative and clever uses of quicktime when I found Robbie Williams - Live At Knebworth promoting a live DVD. This page automatically opens up the Quicktime Player and loads a very pretty custom skin. Quicktime allows the author to customise the apperance and function of the player window almost limitlessly. You may stick to the traditional rectangular window with a playbar controller at the bottom or you may design something of any other (ie, non-rectangular) shape. The Robbie Williams skin is a very complex and detailed shape with similarly designed functionality. Rather than simply playing a single music video clip or film trailer, this .mov allows you to select from a variety of live clips, behind the scenes footage and packaging design photos. Another important aspect is that each element of ‘content’ is loaded dynamically, that is ‘on demand’, so if you decide you only want to see one song, you only have to load one song. The .mov itself is only 228.7k and automatically scales the main ‘content’ area to suit the viewer’s connection speed (this can also be set manually via a series of buttons).
The Quicktime was authored by Bluish. Their other work includes sites and .movs for Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Flaming Lips and more Robbie Williams (more links from site).
Robbie Williams - Come Undone features another custom skin, this time at only 140k. This time the .mov is promoting a single and features a music video, commentary and behind the scenes footage (Warning contains a ‘clean’ version of the song and video complete with pixelated boobies).
I think examples like these show that just as DVD extras have added value to movies (I’m thinking of things like The Criterion Collection more than the average DVD’s promotional ‘featurette’) well designed and authored Quicktime .movs can add effectively value to other content online.
