Video streaming service PlayOn from Media Mall Technologies recently added support for the Wii, which owners of Nintendo’s phenomenally popular video game console can use to watch Hulu, CNN and other selected channels online. It’s about time: The Wii excels at games, but when it comes to offering great online content, it’s running a distant third to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3. That in mind, I gave PlayOn for Wii a quick spin today. Instant verdict: Not a bad video streaming alternative for long format videos, but not yet ready for everyday couch surfing.

You first need to install the PlayOn program on a computer running on the the same network your Wii uses for Internet connectivity. (Instructions here; follow those closely before even turning on your Wii or downloading the client, or you may end up with hours of aggravation and confusion, like me.) Once PlayOn’s launched on your PC, just point your Wii’s web browser to “playon.tv,” and you’re in.

PlayOn’s Wii starting screen presents you with the available channels to choose from, including Netflix and Amazon, though you need to register your account info in the PC client, to access those services. Video quality is not bad, at least on my console — slightly better than the average YouTube video, but a notch or two below Hulu. PlayOn for Wii seems to stream long format videos well; I was able to watch an extended 60 Minutes segment without any sputtering. Overall, however, it is still very beta. For instance, many of Hulu’s listings don’t even have show/subject titles. (I only found Daily Show episodes after much digging, and got a 404 error for my pains.) YouTube videos don’t seem to come with a rewind or replay button. At the moment, channel navigation and content search is so kludgey and time-consuming, it’s not a very good solution for random viewing.

Final summary for Wii owners? Instead of using the 14-day free trial offer now, I’d wait a month or two (or three) in hopes the folks at Media Mall Technologies can work out the worst kinks, and only then give it a whirl before deciding if you want to plunk $39.99 down for a full license.

Flipnote Studio for the Nintendo DSi is a free, downloadable app which just became available in the North American market, and if you like doodling even a bit, you’ll want to check it out. The software turns the DS stylus and touchscreen into a drawing pad with numerous pages, letting you create flip book-style animations, the kind a lot of us used to make during boring elementary school classes. But it’s more than that: You can also use the DSi’s internal microphone to add a soundtrack to your mini-movie, and employ the gaming console’s camera system to incorporate photos into it.

That’s just the start, because you can then upload your animations from the DSi to Flipnote’s web site, where they’re viewable by others on a system which filters user contributions by popularity, views, ratings, and response comments. In other words, it’s pretty much a YouTube for flip book animations. (The videos are even embeddable on other sites.)

Only a day after the U.S. launch, there’s already a number of genuinely engaging, impressive animations (amid the usual thicket of dross.) Unsurprisingly, there are even more epic animations from Flipnote users based in Japan, where it’s been available since last December.

According to the developer, Hatena, Japanese users submitted 1 million uploads in the first six months. If the DSi continues its record sales pace here, where 1.7 million units have already been sold, we’ll likely see similar levels of user-generated enthusiasm from the U.S. market.

In any case, it’s a welcome addition to Nintendo’s Internet connectivity and social-networking features, which have been painfully sparse up to now. That’s even been disappointingly true of the DSi, especially when compared with the iPhone/iPod Touch, which as a platform for games, is steadily eating into the handheld market. With Flipnote Studio and DSi’s recently launched Facebook photo integration, it looks like we’re finally seeing Nintendo struggle to connect with the Web 2.0 crowd. (Better late than never.)

Hollywood Player, a site that cleverly merges two popular online activities — casual social gaming and movie trivia — went into public beta today. The brainchild of Dave Long and Bill Kuper, who created the bestselling, DVD-driven board game Scene It?, the startup repackages content from new and classic Hollywood movies into a number of web-based games.

While there are countless casual games overlaid with movie themes already on the market, I’m particularly impressed by the sleekly produced quality of this site’s offerings, which take full advantage of broadband connectivity and Flash-powered graphics. For example, the jigsaw puzzle game doesn’t just challenge you to reassemble pieces of a static movie still, but animated fragments of an entire scene. My favorite, Well Connected, plays like a mad cross between Guitar Hero and Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in that you have to connect movie stars by their films as their headshots fly toward you. Seasoned casual gamers will likely enjoy these titles, but so will fumble-fingered game noobs who also happen to be film buffs. You can compete with other users in leaderboards and use the site’s Facebook connectivity to bring your friends into the fun. (Multiplayer games and other social aspects are coming soon, Long and Kuper told me in a call yesterday.)

As a business, Hollywood Player has a lot of revenue streams. In this beta phase, there’s Amazon affiliate links to buy the movies featured in the games. Premium content and sponsorship deals will be announced soon, Long and Kuper tell me, including partnerships with several Hollywood studios. As with so many social games nowadays, digital goods will also be a future revenue source. Right now, you can use the Hollywood Credits earned from gaming to buy movie-related sweepstakes tickets. Or if you prefer, you’ll also be able to donate those credits for in-kind cash donations to a designated charity — a brilliant way to leverage gamer activity for a higher purpose. Because at least that way, you won’t feel like you’ve totally wasted your time just idly clicking on Angelina Jolie’s head.

Image courtesy Hollywood Player.

To promote the latest installment of Illegal Danish, their popular World of Warcraft machinima series, D.W. Hackleman and his brother Clint came up with a clever conceit: They fully recreated the trailer of the hotly anticipated game Starcraft II with elements of Warcraft. Now instead of a cigar-chomping space Marine donning an armored helmet, the Hacklemans’ version ends with a spunky purple-haired gnome named Dirti G, ready to rock.

Converting Warcraft’s medieval fantasy trappings into Starcraft’s military sci-fi milieu was a painstaking task that Clint estimates took the brothers about 700 hours to complete. At the end, however, they had a machinima appealing to both Warcraft and Starcraft fans. (Both games, not coincidentally, are from Blizzard Entertainment.) That’s likely to attract more viewers to their Danish series, which according to Clint, has already been viewed over 10 million times. (He says the Starcraft II parody, which went online July 4, has already attracted 50,000 views.)

Known professionally as Myndflame, the Hackleman brothers have developed a lucrative career from their machinima; Clint tells me the projects earn them $50,000 to $100,000 annually. Adhering to Blizzard’s rules around machinima, the brothers don’t sell DVD copies or downloads of their Warcraft movies, but instead monetize them with online ads and CD sales of the movies’ soundtracks. In fact, Clint tells me, “Blizzard is going to be adding some news to their community sites to promote our latest movie next week and seems to be in good spirits (as they should, given the free advertising!)”

To create the Warcraft-to-Starcraft conversion, the brothers used WoW Modelviewer, a program that extracts characters and models from World of Warcraft’s game engine, then heavily modified and composited these elements in 3-D with Maya. “The scene with the shoulder armor being placed onto the gnome was probably the most difficult,” D.W. tells me, “because it used a complex combination of 2-D and 3-D effects with more than a hundred layers.” That’s one way to get medieval on a Marine.

Illegal Danish 3: The Ballad of Dirti G is set for a fall release. But what’s with the title, anyway? “The Danish itself is a mysterious pastry (think of it similar to The Simpsons’ ‘Forbidden Donut’) with powers that vary depending on who’s telling its tale,” Clint explains. Glad that’s cleared up.

Illegal Danish link resources:

Illegal Danish 3 Prelude, HD version, Side-by-side comparison of Starcraft 2 cinematic and Illegal Danish 3 Prelude, Zinwrath: The Movie, Super Snacks, Escape from Orgrimmar.

To help promote next week’s summer movie behemoth Tranformers 2, Paramount recently launched a web site using augmented reality, in which real-world data is merged to a virtual overlay. That’s a fancy way of saying the site uses your web camera to capture video of your face, then plop Optimus Prime’s robot head onto yours. (If you don’t feel like installing the required Active X plug-in, here’s a video of it in action.) Now you can pretend to be a Transformer without having to legally change your name, like a National Guardsman famously did before going to Iraq. I accidentally left the site up during my lunch break, then glanced at my laptop to see Optimus Prime in my living room, noshing on chow mein.

If you’re not a Transformers fan, however, it’ll probably entertain you for roughly 30 seconds. There doesn’t seem to be any functionality beyond the head-matching gimmick, which is disappointing. An option to send “I’m Optimus Prime!” screenshots to friends, for example, or post videos to YouTube, would have been nice additions. (When it comes to using augmented reality video in marketing, I prefer the much more interactive General Electric’s Smart Grid campaign from earlier this year.) At best, then, it’s a very small baby step into augmented reality, but thanks to its connection with a prominent Hollywood movie, will probably introduce a fairly large audience to this still relatively obscure technology. We can only hope future online video productions explore augmented reality’s full potential.

Thanks to countless videos of the Iranian uprising now being streamed on its system, YouTube may suddenly seem to be at the center of international news. But from the company’s perspective, YouTube spokesman Scott Rubin insisted to me in a phone interview this afternoon, it’s more or less just another week at the office. The sudden rush of videos from Iran represent “the core of our mission,” he said. “It’s exciting to see YouTube being used this way, as it’s intended.” He also disputed a New York Times report from yesterday, which suggested the company had “relaxed its usual restrictions” against videos depicting violent imagery so that Iranians could freely upload footage that depicted the often brutal repression now going on in the streets of Tehran and other Persian cities.

In actuality, Rubin said, YouTube has always allowed exceptions for some violent videos that also contained educational, documentary or scientific value. In light of the uprising, he said, “We just pay special attention to make sure…everybody is understanding the policy.” To do that, the company reviews videos flagged by users as objectionable, taking in the whole context, including their titles, tags, and descriptions, along with the video themselves. From that perspective, he offered by way of example, raw cell phone footage depicting protesters running from police would probably be acceptable, but if it was mashed up to include gory close-ups in which “the intent was to shock or disgust,” it would come down. As far as the ideological content of the videos, Rubin made a point of saying, “We are completely agnostic on the politics of this.”

Rubin told me he didn’t know of variation in the number of videos that YouTube users have flagged as objectionable since the popular uprising and the government backlash began. Nor was he sure how many Iran-related videos have been uploaded since last week’s election. However, he did note that the service has dropped to 10 percent of its normal traffic in Iran itself. “We’re assuming we’re blocked” by the Iranian government, he said, though no official from the country has yet contacted the company. Then again, the Chinese government has been blocking YouTube since March, he noted, and no official from the People’s Republic has notified the service, either. Dealing with government censorship is just part of YouTube’s regular workload.

Team Fortress 2 has already been on the market for 18 months, but the multiplayer shooter from Valve Software didn’t reach the peak of its popularity until last weekend — thanks in part to this month’s release of Meet the Spy, the latest in a series of machinima shorts Valve produces to introduce the game’s characters. Up until last week, Valve’s director of business development, Jason Holtman, told me in a conference call, TF2 was hitting maximum concurrency numbers of 32,000 players; over Memorial Day weekend, however, that more than doubled to 68,000. (The single best sales day was also last weekend.)

Like the game itself, Valve’s video series is a clever reworking of traditional first-person shooter conventions, eschewing realistic violence and macho fantasy for cartoonish graphics and ironic wit. (In Meet the Sniper, TF2’s ruthless Aussie marksman gets flustered by his disapproving parents.) Meet the Spy is by far the most ambitious installment, depicting a trio of befuddled squaddies who try to locate an enemy agent in their midst, only to be undone by comic mishap and a surprisingly romantic plot twist.

The series was originally based on monologues that Valve writer Erik Wolpaw drafted for internal use, first as audition scripts, then as a reference guide for the voice actors ultimately hired to record the in-game dialog. According to editor and director Marc Scapparo, the plan was always to evolve these movies over successive installments, from mere character sketches to full-fledged shorts. Working with a Wolpaw script, Scapparo and his team spent a month capturing in-game footage for Spy, then another month enhancing it in post-production. As with Valve’s games, the video was constantly screened to test audiences, and iterated according to their feedback. In the original version, for example, the Red spy was unmasked as the Blue spy, which confused many early viewers, especially those not familiar with the game — sending the team back to the studio for a story overhaul. “Humor’s pretty subjective,” as Wolpaw put it to me. “[But] if someone doesn’t understand what they saw, that’s a pretty objective [problem].”

While Meet the Spy was just a single element in the promotion of Team Fortress 2’s latest update, it’s certainly one of the most buzzed about. TF2 lead developer Robin Walker partly attributes this popularity to the fact that Scapparo and Wolpaw are members of the game’s development team, not external marketers. In the Valve development philosophy, he said, “marketing is a game design problem.” Then there’s the buzz you get from unauthorized distribution: Though it was officially put on Steam, Valve’s online distribution service, on May 19, a leaked copy had already been uploaded dozens of times and seen by countless gamers days earlier.

Denying persistent Internet rumors to the contrary, Walker told me the video was not intentionally leaked by the company. However, he added, “We regard [the leak] as an unbridled success,” pointing to the additional burst of press it provoked. The developers even added a last-minute knowing wink to the final product. If you look carefully at the alarm system in the beginning, the “Intruder Alert” signal sits alongside a new warning message: “Leaked Video.”

Confirming early reports from last week, Sony just announced a machinima tool for use in PlayStation Home, the virtual world for its PS3 videogame console. Dubbed the “Living Room Stage Set” and selling for $4.99 in the PlayStation Home Mall starting today, it’s basically a virtual studio in a box, albeit one missing a key element.

The kit comes with an empty shooting stage that can be dressed as desired, ringed by a lighting system with customizable controls and multiple cameras for viewing the action with different angles and camera shots. There’s a backdrop that can be loaded with pre-set scenery (a beach, a cityscape, etc.) that also functions as a green screen, which you can use to composite your own video footage during the editing process. But here’s the catch: the Stage Set doesn’t come with internal recording tools or an editor.

Hugh Hancock, who helped coin the term “machinima” and wrote a book on the subject, is tentatively interested: “[It seems] pretty comprehensive for a simple machinima tool, the lighting system in particular,” he told me by e-mail. “I’ll definitely be firing up my PS3 and experimenting.” Phil Rice, who created the viral machinima hit “Male Restroom Etiquette“, seemed even more enthused: “I’m not sure machinima has ever had such powerful control over dynamic lighting when combined with such an easy-to-use interface,” he e-mailed me. “That, and the generally very nice-looking graphics engine, seems a big pro.”

On the con side, both were concerned by the Stage Set’s lack of an internal video capture/editing system. Sony’s demo video promises how-to tutorials for that part of the process, but until then, machinima newbies will need to fend for themselves. As Rice put it, “I think insisting on this additional step and hardware purchase greatly reduces their potential participation level, versus a model where movies can be created and shared all within Home.”

Presumably, Sony can address this drawback in later iterations, but that remains to be seen. It would be exciting if the Living Room Stage Set evolved into a full-fledged machinima platform. For now, though, it’s at least a fun kit for would-be machinimators who already own a PlayStation 3.

Thanks to online video sites and the mass market appeal of games like World of Warcraft, “machinima” (movies created from video footage captured within a game) has become incredibly popular, viewed by millions daily. (The videos hosted by Machinima.com alone garner 35 million+ views in a single month.) For all this activity, however, some very basic questions remain unanswered, among them, who owns the copyright for a fan-made machinima? And if you’re a talented machinimator with a large online following, can you make money from your work without getting sued? Last weekend those topics and more were the subject of intense conversation among lawyers, professors, and professional machinima makers, in a conference at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Here’s several takeaways useful for people working with machinima:

Don’t Assume “Fair Use” Will Protect You

I assumed that most machinima would be protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine. But if the lawyers come calling, fair use is only a defense. “If you’re going to claim it,” as Sean Kane, Principal with Drakeford & Kane put it, “you better not be risk averse.” Shane McGee of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, a lawyer who’s represented World of Warcraft developer Blizzard on a number of non-machinima cases, advised machinima creators not to rely on fair use at all, because there’s no common agreement on its application. However, Microsoft lawyer Matt Skelton still recommended that machinimators read up on best practice guidelines for fair use in online video, and consider getting fair use insurance.

Unauthorized Music Is a Huge Red Flag

This point was repeated by several lawyers: While many game companies actively encourage machinima made from their products, video creators are much more likely to get in trouble for using copyrighted music in the background, which attracts unwanted attention from the record labels. (One alternative worth considering: music under a Creative Commons license.)

Read a Game Company’s Policies on Machinima — and Consider Talking With Them

A number of the top game companies have crafted usage rules around machinima. In fact, Microsoft’s Game Content Usage guidelines drew a lot of praise at the conference. (EFF’s Von Lohmann even compared them to the free software GPL license.) World of Warcraft developer Blizzard has machinima guidelines as well. But Von Lohmann strongly advised machinima makers to also read the End User License Agreement for the individual game used. Microsoft’s EULAs recognize fair use, he noted, while Blizzard’s do not.

While most of these rules forbid unauthorized commercial use, creators can still make individual agreements directly with the company. “I don’t want people to think just because we’re a big company that we’re totally unavailable,” said Microsoft’s Matt Skelton, even pointing to a contact email (gamevids at microsoft dot com) for would-be machinimator pros to pitch the company. (Halo machinima developer Rooster Teeth, for instance, has a commercial deal with Microsoft.)

Don’t Panic

Though EFF’s Van Lohmann often advises machinimators worried about the legal dangers of publishing their work, he said, “I have not heard of a machinima creator being hunted down by copyright lawyers.” Regardless, “Copyright damages don’t scare me that much,” Von Lohmann added, because they’re not likely to be excessive. (“That only applies to a noncommercial machinima built on one game product,” he clarified by email afterward, “and which has a plausible fair use defense. If it’s a commercial effort and doesn’t have a good fair use story to tell, then I’m plenty scared.”) Copyright cases may also incur statutory damages ranging anywhere from $750 to $30,000, but Von Lohmann said it’s hard to imagine a court hitting a non-profit/non-commercial machinimator with a penalty in the upper range. Some game company EULAs include a clause that if a case is decided for the plaintiff, the defendant must pay the companies’ legal fees — but even then, judges will sometimes toss that stipulation.

Despite all the lawyerly advice, however, there’s been little legal precedent set around machinima, and as such, numerous questions remain unanswered. For example, does machinima really qualify as “non-commercial” if it’s uploaded by a channel owner on a commercial service like YouTube? And while many companies have EULAs with a clause that retroactively claims license to machinima made with their material, what happens if the next big viral video machinima is made by a minor? As Roxanne Christ of Latham Watkins LLP pointed out, minors don’t have the capacity to enter into binding contracts in most states, and cannot even assign away their IP rights in California without a court-supervised proceeding.

Just two of many concerns worth debating at the next machinima and law conference — unless, that is, they’re decided in court first.

To launch his SXSW panel, “Comedy on Television and the Web,” moderator Ricky Van Veen of CollegeHumor.com opened with a provocative but arguable point: Unlike previous technologies, humor and not porn is driving the adoption of online video.

What followed was a smart and (yes) funny conversation between leaders in web-based comedy and a couple luminaries in televised humor pondering how large web comedy can become compared with TV, and how the two mediums will influence each other. From the online world were panelists Van Veen, Keith Richman of Break Media, and Avner Ronen of Boxee;  Meredith Scardino, staff writer for The Colbert Report, and B.J. Novak, a star and writer for the U.S. version of The Office represented for old teevee. Here are some of my other favorite highlights, arranged as a series of questions (sometimes posed by the audience or panel, and sometimes by me):

Why are Hollywood stars afraid of Web video?

Van Veen notes that besides the occasional exception like Will Ferrell, most Hollywood stars are skittish about web video. Novak (left) speculates that they’re uncomfortable because it doesn’t have much connection with the film industry’s development infrastructure (the personal connections, the talent agencies, etc.) that they’re familiar with. Richman said he believes stars are afraid because the web is a democratic environment, where their efforts can be noticeably eclipsed by the latest grassroots breakout.

How much does a TV show’s Internet audience influence the program?

Scardino (left) notes that The Colbert Report’s passionate online fanbase, Colbert Nation, is a large part of the show’s success. “They could take Luxembourg’s army if they wanted to,” she says, noting that a Colbert greenscreen challenge to make McCain interesting garnered 1,000 video entries. (“When you can pull off ironic self-aggrandizement,” says The Office’s Novak, impressed, “you really have it made.”)

In any case, the Internet seems to be influencing television. Boxee’s Ronen (left) says if you Google Boxee and Comcast together, “Beside profanities, you’ll find people are downgrading their cable” as they chuck their TV services for Internet delivery.

Why isn’t web video monetizing as well as television?

According to Richman, 93 percent of sponsor money is still spent on TV, even though much web programming has larger viewerships than some cable programs, and can often be better targeted to a sponsor’s demographic. “There’s still not a level of respect from Hollywood and advertisers” in the online space, he says. Still, Richman believes sponsors will gradually get used to buying ads for the web. They better: Where $300 once seemed like a lot of money to sped on developing web videos, Richman says some of Break Media’s programming can now cost $5,000-10,000.

How does web comedy go viral?

The alchemy to make a comedy video go big remains a mystery to the panelists, though social network promotion seems to help quite a bit. “We live and die by Digg,” as Van Veen put it; he said Collegehumor.com also gained a million uniques after adding Facebook’s share function. “A good title and thumbnail will go a long, long way” to building viewership, says Richman. Van Veen reports that shortly after going online, their video “Realistic Hollywood Sex Scene” wound up on the first page of Google searches for “sex.”

Just how funny can Web video be?

While comedic web videos with quick punchlines and weirdness do well, the panel wondered if the medium could succeed where TV does well, with character-driven comedies. Most were skeptical, since those require more patience from the viewer. As a counterpoint, Van Veen notes that their “Jake and Amir” show is quite popular, though character-driven. (He noted that it did take a while to build up the audience, however.)

Who will be the winners and losers of web-driven comedy?

Richman believes the web’s future comedy stars will be multi-talented performers who can do a little of everything, citing Sasha Baron-Cohen, as an example; Scardino points to the guys behind Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show.

And the losers? Web viewing will decrease the value of TV syndication. Instead of watching whatever happens to be on, as Novak put it, “people don’t watch stuff they don’t want on the Internet.”

“Those that should be scared are people who are making content that is not great,” says Boxee’s Ronen. And surprisingly, though he sat alongside writers with TV’s biggest comedies, it was probably Ronen who got one of the panel’s biggest laughs. When asked what their favorite online videos were, Ronen answered, “My favorite online video site is Hulu.com” — a wry nod at Boxee’s recent travails with the service.

Disclosure: I was an unpaid adviser during SXSW’s panel selection process. Image credits: Ronen from TV Week, the rest from their respective SXSW profiles.

Though Bruce Branit completed World Builder — a poignant and visually dazzling short movie about a man who literally creates a new reality for the woman he loves — in 2007, it’s likely that far more people have seen it this March than in the last two years combined, thanks to the viral power of Internet distribution.

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo

In World Builder, a beautiful European town square seems to materialize from thin air and the builder’s glowing user interface; visually it compares favorably to scenes from The Matrix and Minority Report. But like the $400 Escape from City 17, it’s another example of what’s possible with low budgets and a high degree of inventiveness. In an email interview, Branit estimated that he spent just a little more than $2,000 of his own money for the stage, the equipment, and the camera. His brother, a cinematographer, called in favors for the live action elements, which were shot in a single day. (The cast and crew worked for free.) Branit finished the rest in the Lightwave 3-D graphics platform, working on it in between paying gigs over a couple years.

Like most indie filmmakers searching for a career-making breakthrough, Branit, a Kansas-based visual effects artist, sought to get World Builder on the festival circuit, but after sending it out nearly 40 times, it was accepted by just five low-profile festivals. He subsequently won awards at four of those, but nothing came of them. Bitter and drained, Branit finally put Builder on his site as a portfolio sample, and just “in case someone else wanted to see it,” he said. By then, “I had sort of put the film behind me.”

The Internet, however, had other plans.

Some acquaintances posted a link to World Builder on a Lightwave discussion forum, and it quickly went viral from there.

Within a week, the video had half a million views, and today — just 12 days since it was first uploaded to Vimeo — Branit says it’s reached a million views across all sites where it’s hosted.

Word-of-mouth has drawn views from unlikely places — including more than 175,000 views via a weekend link from political blogger Andrew Sullivan, and numerous Second Life bloggers who have promoted it, sensing a thematic affinity. (Branit says he’s not familiar with the user-created virtual world, though; his actual inspiration for the story, he said, is the fanciful concept that construction workers “physically worked to build our world and our reality in the moments before we experience it… one day it occured to me that our new digital tools would be a much better representation of this.”)

In 2000, Branit co-created 405, one of the Net’s first viral videos, and while the effects-laden, SUV-meets-airliner short earned him some attention from the film industry, it ultimately didn’t lead to the feature film deal he was seeking. “We learned a lot about Hollywood after 405,” said Branit. This time, as he sets up a few meetings, “I already have a feature concept for the builder and his love.” While he already has a successful career as a behind-the-scenes effects developer for TV and film, the success of this viral movie may be the thing that builds it up into the big time.

If you’re an avid YouTube viewer, you’ve probably noticed the growing number of videos on the site that contain clickable links within the display screen. That’s the result of Video Annotations, a feature introduced last June that allows other clips to be embedded into videos. Lately it’s been increasingly used to string together several (or even several dozen) individual videos to create interactive video series. Many resemble a 21st-century version of those old “choose your own adventure” kids books or the original, laser disc-driven Dragon’s Lair, and suggest new ways to package future video content. Here’s a sampling to give you a sense of what’s possible in this evolving sub-genre — or at the very least, something to watch during your next lunch break.

Bboy Joker: Created by Canadian animator Patrick Boivin, who also made the YouTube Street Fighter videos we covered last month (which remains my favorite interactive series.) His latest is a stop-motion animated breakdance competition between The Joker and Batman, using highly articulated action figures based on The Dark Knight. You choose one of the characters, then try to mirror your competitors’ moves by memorizing their sequence and choosing the correct one from a quickly-flashing multiple choice menu at the top of the video. Watching Boivin’s impressive and complex animation sequences are just as entertaining as the interactive feature, if not more so.

The Time Machine: Created by the LA comedy team Chad, Matt & Rob as a self-promotional stunt, you must safely guide several hapless corporate dudes past medieval dragons and futuristic zombies (or rather, extremely low-budget versions of same) and back to the Noon office meeting. The high-energy weirdness almost makes up for the total lack of frills, but the interactivity is often more irksome than entertaining. At one point, for example (spoiler warning), you’re punished for making the morally right choice (helping an endangered buddy), so the decision-making process comes off as arbitrary.

M.I.V.E Halo and M.I.V.E. Killzone: Billed as a “Machinima Interactive Video Experience,” this is more of a marketing platform for Machinima.com, incorporating machinima video footage from hit games Killzone and Halo. Choose the right weapons and courses of action to complete a challenge, and if you succeed, get a chance to win a prize.

Fans of the original games, which reward quick thinking and observation, are likely to become frustrated. In the M.I.V.E versions, user actions are limited to extremely simple choices (i.e., guard your flag/get your opponents’ flag), and there’s no evident onscreen clues for choosing wisely. Consequently, it’s not a very successful marriage of content and interactivity. Since they’re derived from first-person shooters, maybe a better way to make these videos meaningfully interactive would have been multiple, clickable targets embedded in each scene. Or at the very least, something more like Fast Draw Showdown.

2009 Oscars Interactive Picture Photo Hunt! An increasingly challenging game of “guess which thing doesn’t belong,” you’re shown side-by-side copies of the same movie still, and before the time runs out on each video, you have to find and click on the discordant element within an overlaid grid. (Heath Ledger with an extra arm, Kate Winslet missing a clothing item, and so on.) This is actually a more satisfying game experience than the M.I.V.E. videos mentioned above, because here you’re rewarded for keen observation and fast response time. As with the Batman/Joke faceoff, it’s a great use of the interactive feature; I’d love to see more game videos created along these lines.

It still remains to be seen if Annotations become more than an occasional novelty that eventually wears out its welcome. Some viewers have clamored to get them disabled, or even suggest they signal the coming end of YouTube’s dominance. From my perspective, the feature just awaits a true breakout success. Once someone comes up with a Where the Hell is Matt? of interactive videos, many more are sure to follow.

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