Annotation Links

Annotation Links are a powerful tool to display a message to your viewers while keeping them engaged without having to interrupt your video.

Note
Annotation Links cannot be added to audio files.

There are some cool tips and tricks that you can do with Annotation Links, and this page will show you how.

Using Annotations as messages

You may not always need to have your Annotation be a link that redirects. Maybe you’re just looking to add a quick comment or drop some additional notes during a particular part of your video. You can do that with Annotation Links too! You’ll just want to simply leave the URL box empty.

Using Annotations to skip to parts of your video

Have you ever seen the Netflix “Skip Intro” button? Want to add something similar to your own videos? Well Annotations are the answer to what you’re looking for! To do this, you’ll just need to know the Hashed ID of your Wistia video, the time you want to skip to, and some gumption!

Your video’s Hashed ID is just the last 10 digits of your Wistia URL. As an example, let’s say we have a video with the hashed ID: a62xl92vp

Now if we wanted our Annotation to skip to the 20 second period of the video, we’ll just want to add the below snippet to our Annotation Link URL box:

#wistia_a62xl92vp9?time=20s

You can use that snippet above as an example for your own video. You’ll just want to make sure you update that Hashed ID each time. And if you have longer videos, then you can edit the time stamp to include minutes or hours as well. You can follow the format like so: ?time=00h00m00s which stands for hours, minutes, and seconds.

Here’s how that example looks with one of our own videos: