Overlay.TV is another new web offering about which I have been remiss in writing—considering that the company’s CEO gave me a personal guided tour. Hill & Knowlton’s David Jones set up the online demo for my podcast co-host, Neville Hobson (who already wrote about it) and me.

In a nutshell, Overlay lets you add text, images, and hyperlinks to video. These elements overlay the video and can be turned on and off.

You don’t have to link from an overlay element; you can just add an image, as one person did with a video that puts thought balloons over animals (“Don’t come any closer,” a cat tells a pack of puppies). But linking is the key. In “How to Create a Smoky Eye Effect,” the training video provides a link to each makeup implement used, such as pencils. The link opens a popup window that offers more information and another link to the product webpage. The popup also provides links to the points in the video where the product is used, letting you jump to that spot in the video. Along the right-hand side of the video are “targets,” links to the point in the video where each product appears.

The target feature reminds me a bit of Click.tv, which let you create points in a video and add comments to it; you could also enable the video so anyone watching could add a comment. (The service, on which I worked as a commumnications consultant, was sold and has not reemerged.) The Overlay feature would allow you to add your own information at specified spots in the video, but isn’t open to community comment beyond the YouTube-like comment field beneath the video.

As with most video-sharing sites these days, you can use the embed code to put the video on your own site, rate it, and comment on it.

One smart move the folks at Overlay have made is ensuring its system is compatible with videos from other services, including YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo! Video, Veoh, Google and even JibJab.

Overlay has inked deals with some 600 merchants; if you sign up as an affiliate and link to their products, you stand to make a bit of change.

I suspect many of the uses to which Overlay will be put have yet to emerge, but it certainly adds fuel to the Internet video surge and provides yet another spin on how video can be more interactive when it’s online.