At the recent D&AD student awards Christian Söderholm & Dennis Rosenqvist of Hyper Island in Sweden won a First prize for their Tag iPlayer idea for the BBC. The concept is to allow users to watch media on the iPlayer as normal, but with the help of a widget they can get related, additional content through tags which can also be shared with friends. The idea is that users can find out instant information about actors, recipes and other related content.

Great idea! So how could technology companies use this type of deep video tagging concept to sell more products?

Tagging from within the video would allow technology companies to promote their products in more depth by offering links to further resources as 'asides' to the main content; in product demos for example, by adding things like user reviews, related products, more in depth information, gallery of images etc the user gets a clearer picture of the product than they would have if the video were viewed without tags. You could address the fact that people have differing levels of technical understanding by offering explanation if required. If not, great, skip the tag and go ahead with the video. As video is used more and more on e-commerce sites to show products, this type of thing is sure to become more of a requirement.