Towards a better video comparison: comparison as a way of browsing the video contents

Comparison between videos is a basic task used in a wide variety of activities and domains. With ever-increasing social media contents that allow the mass consumption of video medium, our needs and uses for video comparison will only increase in the coming years. However, the interaction to support the task of comparing between videos is not well understood today, and there is very little theoretical foundation to guide future design for supporting video comparison. In this paper, we take the comparison as the primary angle to look at video-related interaction such as watching, browsing, and editing. By reinterpreting those interaction and synthesising available knowledge from HCI, visualisation and multimedia fields, we construct a theoretical structure that embeds essential conceptual components for supporting video comparison. These concepts not only help explain the existing user-interfaces of video applications as a comparison interaction, but also generate discussion and implications for novel interactive features to enhance our everyday consumption of video contents.