Metacafe now enables viewers to personalize their entertainment experiences by adding dialog bubbles, photos, webcam video, clip art, subtitles and more to online videos. These viewers turned co-creators can save their work for the enjoyment of other members of the Metacafe community and can share their personalized clips with friends via e-mail. This creativity toolkit, called PLYfx allows content enrichment web services and tools which enable interactivity and enrichment of web videos.

Now available as part of a beta test, registered users of Metacafe can enable PLYfx by visiting http://blog.metacafe.com/?p=165 and clicking on the “Enable PLYfx” button. When watching a video on Metacafe, these users can now click on the PLYfx button that appears in the upper left corner of the video player. An intuitive drop-down menu appears that leads users through the process of personalizing the video by adding images and text, enabling them to share thoughts, add characters, create a dialog or extend the storyline. Viewers can also add subtitles, enabling people who speak different languages or those who are hearing-impaired to enjoy the video in a way not previously possible.

The original video remains unaltered. Metacafe viewers can save a library of their customized creations, which are accessible to other viewers, and can send these creations to their friends via e-mail or embed their creation directly from the PLYfx application within the video player. Each new PLYfx creation is assigned a unique URL, which enables its creator to promote the work elsewhere.