Youtube Annotations

Youtube has finally added a new feature to their website, it’s called Youtube Annotations and you can see it here in action. It’s basically subtitles for videos although they prefer to call it annotations to make it clear that they can be used for a broader purpose. Subtitles usually only provide a textual version of the voice acting in videos and to a lesser extent scene descriptions.

Youtube Annotations could be used to add information to the video. This is a great chance to add value to a video but poses the risk that many videos might be misused for advertisement.

Thankfully though it’s relatively easy to turn annotations off unfortunately though only on a per video basis. The Youtube video bar at the bottom of each video has a new item located in the right corner of the bar.

If you click on that icon a new icon appears on top of it. That icon turns the annotations off and on. Probably only a matter of time until someone creates a Greasemonkey script for users who want to turn off annotations completely.