…. when I stumbled upon the ‘edit video detail’ toolbar at the top of the page. Now I had seen this previously and had chosen to ignore it as my video editing is done in either Flipshare or more recently in Windows Movie Maker.
What an oversight on my behalf!!!
Within the video editing options there is an option to add annotations. Now this in itself is nothing startling as many video editing tools allow you to annotate on top of the video footage, but what this allows you to do is to add a ‘spotlight’ on top of anything that is being shown in the YouTube footage.
This spotlight (imagine a hot spot) will then allow a URL (including another YouTube video) to be added to it.
This then allows your YouTube video to become interactive in so far as the viewer can be steered towards making a choice which then jumps them from one YouTube video to another to another etc etc depending upon their choices. For a far more in-depth account as to how to do this then check out this blog post.
Of course I almost fell over myself in an attempt to try this out so I hope you’ll all be able to see past the poor lighting and dodgy camera angles to the real potential that this approach to using YouTube can bring. My only niggle at this moment in time is that upon completion of the clip it jumps (as any YouTube clip does) to a ‘related videos’ window, this in turn stops the viewer from making any on-screen selection at the end of the clip, so it prevents the viewer from being able reflect upon the available choices.
Confused?
Then try watching the following short clip without making any selection and you’ll see what happens at the end of the video. Then you can replay the video and start taking part for real…
So what do you think?
Is this something you could use?
If so, what for?
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