As soon as Youtube updated the look of their embedded player for all ( it was optional before ), it has added an amazing feature which screams "Youtube is the king of online video!". This might seem like a big statement to some who like Veoh, Hulu, Dailymotion and other websites more. But the fact that you can now add speech bubbles, spotlights and notes to any video you upload to Youtube keeps it above the rest.
Youtube Annotations is the newest and most innovative feature so far that I"ve seen in online video sharing websites as it brings a whole new dimension of interactivity to your videos. As a matter of fact, it does for online videos, what subtitles have done for DVDs. The process of adding annotations to your videos isn"t difficult either. It involves you uploading the video of your choice, or selecting one of your already uploaded videos. On the video page, you"ll see a new portion under the embed code area. Click the Add Annotations button, and you"ll be taken to the Annotations editor, which is built like a movie editor software would be, only it"s much simpler and easier to use. Instead of a separate timeline as with desktop applications, it allows you to work on the seek bar of your Youtube video and use that as a timeline. You can click either of the 3 options ( Add Speech Bubble, Add Note, Add Spotlight ). All these options are very useful as with speech bubbles, you can make comic style bubbles which can make it very interesting depending on the video. With notes, you can just add a note on any portion of the video ( it can also be used as subtitles, only problem being that the background isn"t transparent). And spotlight can highlight an area on the video, but wont show any text unless you hover on that portion. You can even use links ( although the links are limited to Youtube"s only for now) in your text.