Web Video By Megan O'Neill on December 7, 2010 1:00 PM

EmbedPlus for YouTube: Add Reactions, Instant Replay & More To Embeds [Interview]

Have you ever wished you could add extra functionality to embedded YouTube videos like annotations, instant replay, slow-mo, real time reactions and more in order to improve the viewer experience on your blog or website? EmbedPlus is a new video-based tool that lets you do just that. I had the opportunity to ask EmbedPlus Co-Founder Shola “Tay” Omojokun a few questions about the video embed upgrading service. Read on to find out what he had to say, as well as how EmbedPlus works.

The best way to understand how EmbedPlus works is to take a look at a YouTube video that has been embedded using the tool. Check out an example by clicking on the image below. You can play around with this video I embedded using the service to see how it works. Click around the extra navigation bar which appears below the regular YouTube play and pause timeline to play the video in slow motion, replay, skip ahead to different scenes (which the person who does the embedding can set up), read annotations written by the person who embedded the video, zoom in, and even read real-time reactions to the video on YouTube and Twitter.

Click on the image below to view the example. Unfortunately, WordPress likes to make unwanted changes to HTML from time to time, so I wasn’t able to embed the actual EmbedPlus player here. However, Tay tells me that a popular WordPress plugin called Raw HTML can fix the problem, so if you’ve got WordPress and plan to embed videos using the service all you have to do is install that plugin.

Now that you’ve seen how EmbedPlus works, find out what Tay had to say about the inspiration behind the tool, what’s in store for EmbedPlus in the future and more in my interview below.

Megan at Social Times: Can you tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind EmbedPlus?

Tay Omojokun: The inspiration for EmbedPlus came from two primary things. First, I’m working on another project/startup that will be launching sometime early next year. It incorporates web video as a large part of its user-experience, and we needed the core functionality you see on the current EmbedPlus widget for our internal tests.

Second, we are naturally big fans of web video, often incorporating video watching into our coding breaks. We began to notice that some of the features in our then internal widget could be quite useful when viewing videos we saw online.

[As an example, Tay told me that many blogs, websites and video sharing sites may point viewers to a specific spot in a video (i.e. "Skip ahead to 3:10 to see what I'm talking about"). With the EmbedPlus widget, these people would be able to add a scene at 3:10 to make it easy for viewers to skip ahead. He also pointed out that the slow motion feature is great for videos of sporting events and other videos where things go by just a little bit too fast to see with the naked eye.]

After collectively seeing enough cases of videos that could use some of the features we were internally using, we decided it was worth packaging it up as a free tool for others to use. We are also particularly motivated about providing a tool that would allow users to add things like slow motion and third-party annotations without having to deal with the effort or copyright issues of altering a video that someone else possibly owns.

Megan: Do you plan on adding additional features and functionality to the EmbedPlus player?

Tay: Yes, we do plan on adding more, with some being more complex than others. A simple feature we could add soon is the ability to add links within the third-party annotations. Also, for real-time reactions, there are other feeds that would be interesting to add besides Twitter and YouTube.

Down the line we plan on supporting what we are calling ‘smart playback features’ that we’ve already been playing with for our other project. The flexible nature of ‘programmable’ computers certainly provides an opportunity to do things with playback that are not easy to do with standalone TVs, cable boxes, etc. In short, there’s been lots of cool academic and institutional research that’s been done in the area of video and image processing and we hope that EmbedPlus can be a platform for openly experimenting with them.

Tay also told me that EmbedPlus plans to expand to Vimeo as well (they are currently only available for embedding YouTube videos). They are also planning to launch something related to music in the near future that should spark some interest from music bloggers and folks that like to embed a lot of music videos, and they have also receives positive feedback from sports bloggers. But they aren’t just focusing on sports and music fanatics. Tay tells me the company’s goal “is to officially launch the service to a wide audience to let people know our feature set exists.”

Personally I think that EmbedPlus is a fantastic tool that will allow users to do a whole lot more when covering online videos on their blogs and websites, or sharing them with their friends. I especially think the third party annotations and scene skipping features are something that we’ll see a whole lot more of in the future. What do you think of EmbedPlus? Would you use it to embed videos on your blog or website?