Something I missed mentioning in the annotation post: Samsung is out ahead in the commercial annotations game with their campaign for the Samsung Instinct.

Follow Your Instinct is an annotation-powered choose-your-own-adventure movie in which you (a young heterosexual male office worker) must make a series of choices between (1) having sex and (2) doing boring shit. You’re rewarded for following your rebellious instincts (jury’s out on how the compulsively boring dudes out there feel about this).

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With YouTube’s video annotations feature starting to get some momentum (see below for update), I thought it might be good to address the concept of interactive video. “Hypervideo” – the inclusion of dynamic hyperlinks into video on a time-dependant basis – isn’t particularly new. In early 2004, web ad technology company United Virtualities released their Shoshmosis engine, which placed a clickable Flash layer over streaming video. Before that, eline Technologies (now VideoClix) had a QuickTime-based solution complete with clickable objects that triggered contextual content alongside the playing video. But hypervideo has yet to penetrate into the online mainstream, and most web video experiences are still remarkably linear.

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