YouTube has long been a major centre of social media for organizations.
This year they unveiled Annotations, an interactive way for users to be engaged throughout their videos. Any videos uploaded by an organization contain the ability to display speech bubbles, notes, tags, or links to other YouTube videos as per that organization’s wishes. These Annotations can be dynamically placed anywhere on the viewing area of the movie for any desired duration. This presents a greater ability to inform or reach viewers.
More than just the added benefit of informing viewers, this new service provides the ability for users to completely interact with the video they are watching. For example:
In this video, the viewer is actually able to play the game and select an outcome.
Possibly one of the best features of this added service to YouTube is its ease of control. To edit Annotations go to the Edit video page or My Videos page as shown below and click “Annotations” under the listed video.
This will bring you to a page with four Annotations options, (Speech Bubble, Note, Spotlight, and Pause Annotation), a panel for editing your Annotations, and a preview video.
The owner of the video is able to drag Annotations around on their video, change the duration of the Annotations, and even insert links from that Annotation to a relevant YouTube video, like with the Shell Game video above.
Types of Annotations
Speech Bubble – This should be pretty self-explanatory. It is a speech bubble you can place in a video to make figures in that video look like they are saying something to the audience.
Note – This is for describing the video or providing a tidbit of information relevant to the video.
Spotlight – This works similar to tagging systems in photo galleries. The owner of a video can put a highlightable box over any figures in the video and when the viewer hovers over that box they see who or what is in that frame.
Pause Annotation – This will pause the video for any duration of your choice. A pause timer will appear on the video to allow the viewer to gauge how long the video will be paused for. This can be done to provide time for the viewer to read text or select a link.
This year they unveiled Annotations, an interactive way for users to be engaged throughout their videos. Any videos uploaded by an organization contain the ability to display speech bubbles, notes, tags, or links to other YouTube videos as per that organization’s wishes. These Annotations can be dynamically placed anywhere on the viewing area of the movie for any desired duration. This presents a greater ability to inform or reach viewers.
More than just the added benefit of informing viewers, this new service provides the ability for users to completely interact with the video they are watching. For example:
In this video, the viewer is actually able to play the game and select an outcome.
Possibly one of the best features of this added service to YouTube is its ease of control. To edit Annotations go to the Edit video page or My Videos page as shown below and click “Annotations” under the listed video.
This will bring you to a page with four Annotations options, (Speech Bubble, Note, Spotlight, and Pause Annotation), a panel for editing your Annotations, and a preview video.
The owner of the video is able to drag Annotations around on their video, change the duration of the Annotations, and even insert links from that Annotation to a relevant YouTube video, like with the Shell Game video above.
Types of Annotations
Speech Bubble – This should be pretty self-explanatory. It is a speech bubble you can place in a video to make figures in that video look like they are saying something to the audience.
Note – This is for describing the video or providing a tidbit of information relevant to the video.
Spotlight – This works similar to tagging systems in photo galleries. The owner of a video can put a highlightable box over any figures in the video and when the viewer hovers over that box they see who or what is in that frame.
Pause Annotation – This will pause the video for any duration of your choice. A pause timer will appear on the video to allow the viewer to gauge how long the video will be paused for. This can be done to provide time for the viewer to read text or select a link.
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