YouTube experimenting with ‘interactive videos’
I just stumbled upon this video on YouTube, which contains links, clickable objects, speech bubbles and text as an overlay. It is announced as the first interactive video. Now we know why YouTube rolled out their new player.
It seems that this points in the direction of new advertising opportunities. They probably want to enable sponsors to tag objects like a watch or a car and display advertising when people hover over it. For example if an actor is wearing an IWC watch, they could point to an online shop selling this watch when someone is hovering over it.
There are already several other companies working on this. E.g. Innovid (mentioned here) or Asterpix (mentioned here).