Google Patent Application Appears to Describe Method for Creating Interactive Games on YouTube

Google has filed a patent application that appears to describe a method for collaboratively creating interactive games on top of videos on YouTube. The existence of the patent application--entitled "Web-Based System for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos," and billed as describing a means to provide "the collaborative generation of interactive features for digital videos, and in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of video playback locations and creation of interactive games"--was first reported by Erik Sherman at BNET. It was filed in February and published last month.

The full text of the application is available here. According to Sherman (note: [itvt] came across Sherman's story just as we were going to press, and so were only able to skim through the application ourselves), the "nut" of the application's description is the following paragraph: "A video may have associated with it one or more annotations, which modify the appearance and/or behavior of a video as it was originally submitted to an online video hosting site. Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video. Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video. Selecting such annotations causes playback of the target video to begin at the associated time. Such annotations can be used to construct interactive games using videos, such as a game in which clicking on different portions of a video leads to different outcomes." [itvt] plans to cover this story in more depth in the near future.

In other Google/YouTube news:

• A profile by Miguel Helft in the New York Times of YouTube's director of product management, Hunter Walk, discusses the company's efforts to improve its recommendations capabilities, and also provides some insight into how Walk and his team think YouTube's service should evolve: "During a recent meeting," Helft reports, "a small group of engineers and user interface designers were brainstorming what might be the next big step in the site's evolution: pages that would immediately begin playing a stream of clips tailored for a user, instead of offering lists of suggested videos. The idea is to push more videos at users in the hope of allowing them to abandon the keyboard and increasingly experience YouTube from the couch." Helft also reports that Walk and his team are "working on new ways to let users collectively create lists of videos that share a topic, like cats playing keyboards."
• Advocacy groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy, have asked US antitrust regulator, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to prevent Google's planned $750 million purchase of mobile advertising network operator, AdMob, on the grounds that the acquisition would "substantially lessen competition in the increasingly important mobile advertising market" and that it also raises significant privacy concerns. Reuters has more.