Google Might Get Into Hosted Gaming Via YouTube

bizwriter writes "A recent patent application from Google describes a way 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.' Get into the description and you find it's about building games on top of video submissions, making it sound that Google plans to extend its YouTube site into an associated gaming site."

Previously advertised

[raving griff]

Back when annotations first came to Youtube, the site advertised that the annotations could be used to make interactive videos and games by linking together videos. They included a magic trick video as an example in which you would select a particular card or something to that effect and you would be linked to the magician doing a trick specifically based on that card. The description of the patent sounds very similar to the language they used when describing it, so I don't believe we can expect any innovation (covered by this patent at the very least) beyond what Youtube already has.

You may have already seen it

[TheModelEskimo]

Stuff like this video [youtube.com] illustrates the point better than TFA. Basically you can use Google's annotations tool to turn videos into "Choose your own Adventure" games or even full multimedia presentations. From TFA it sounds like Google want to make it possible to do this all within a single video. Not a bad idea.

I think it would be a great idea for Google to spin off a Youtube-like site for videos of this type that tell interactive stories.