YouTube blog has announced the release of the beta version of Video Annotations. Video annotations allows you to add commentary to your videos – interactive commentary at that.
To quote the YouTube blog:
With this feature, you can add background information, create branching (“choose your own adventure” style) stories or add links to any YouTube video, channel, or search results page — at any point in your video.
As the uploader you have complete control whether or not you want to use Video Annotations. You are able to insert commentary by adding speech bubbles, notes and highlight boxes at any point in your video. You can insert an unlimited number of annotations in each video as well.
Annotations, once published, are shown by default. You can turn them off while watching a video through the player menu—just click the button on the bottom right of the video player.
I particularly like the branching idea which would be ideal for training and how to videos. ‘How to’ type videos are always popular and with an interactive function will become even more so. As web publishers, being able to add videos to YouTube is becoming an important tool and those who have done so already are starting to see traffic generated from them. This new function provides more reasons to join the throng.
