Abstract: The last decade has seen innovations that make video recording, manipulation, storage and sharing easier than ever before, thus impacting many areas of life. New video retrieval scenarios emerged as well, which challenge the state-of-the-art video retrieval approaches. Despite recent advances in content analysis, video retrieval can still benefit from involving the human user in the loop. We present our experience with a class of interactive video retrieval scenarios and our methodology to stimulate the evolution of new interactive video retrieval approaches. More specifically, the Video Browser Showdown evaluation campaign is thoroughly analyzed, focusing on the years 2015-2017. Evaluation scenarios, objectives and metrics are presented, complemented by the results of the annual evaluations. The results reveal promising interactive video retrieval techniques adopted by the most successful tools and confirm assumptions about the different complexity of various types of interactive retrieval scenarios. A comparison of the interactive retrieval tools with automatic approaches (including fully automatic and manual query formulation) participating in the TRECVID 2016 Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) task is discussed. Finally, based on the results of data analysis, a substantial revision of the evaluation methodology for the following years of the Video Browser Showdown is provided.