Rise Of The Planet Of Annotations

Late last night after an exhausting day I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes on HBO, again, and it got me thinking.

Caesar was a chimpanzee who got smart and eventually led a primate revolution that took over the world. That’s how I like to think about Video Annotations.

In 2007 a small company named Omnisio launched a product allowing people to annotate videos and even sync them to slideshows. Just to be clear for the uninitiated, to annotate a video means to add other content that will appear synchronous to the playback of that video. It was cool stuff and YouTube, seeing the promise, quickly acquired them to make it their very own. In 2008 they used Omnisio to launch YouTube Annotations which has grown to become a cornerstone of promotion and marketing for YouTube users. Annotations are a massively successful feature for YouTube that drive up channel subscriptions and views.