YouTube API Blog

Find the hidden patterns with YouTube’s new Analytics API

2013-05-10T13:40:00.002-07:00

Trying to figure out how YouTube’s one billion monthly users are interacting with your videos? Try the new YouTube Analytics API to get custom reports of the YouTube statistics you care about in a direct JSON or CSV response, perfect for dashboards and ad hoc reports.

The new API includes all the standard view and engagement metrics you would expect, including views, shares, and subscriber numbers. Compared to the previous Insight Data API, you also get:

Watch metrics: Track estimated minutes watched across channel, content owner, or video, and dive into the video details with average view time and average view percentage.
Earning performance metrics: Track estimated earnings (net revenue) from select advertising sources across your content.
Ad performance metrics: Break down video performance with monetized playbacks, ad impressions, gross revenue, and cost per impression reports.
Annotation metrics: Optimize overlays/annotations with click through and close rate metrics.

Client Libraries and Code Samples

You’ll find client libraries for the languages you use most, with nine different languages available today. You can also make HTTP RESTful requests directly, and with our API Explorer, you can try out sample reports before writing any code.

Don’t write your code from scratch! Get started with code examples in Java, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. If you want a step-by-step walkthrough of building a complete web application, have a look at our JavaScript exercise.

App Examples

Check out some apps that are already using the API:

Next Big Sound

VidIQ

Next Big Sound provides analytics and insights for the music industry by tracking billions of social signals including YouTube. This enables record labels, artists, and band managers to make better decisions on everything from promotion strategies to tour locations.
vidIQ is an audience development suite that works with global brands to organically grow their views and subscribers. Their features include cross-platform social analytics, advanced comment management, SEO tools, social syndication and influencer identification.

Wizdeo

Vidyard

Wizdeo’s WizTracker provides in-depth analysis of YouTube channels to help with cross promotion and video comparisons during their initial launch. Users get access to detailed analytics about views, subscriber engagement, traffic sources and demographics.
Vidyard is a video marketing platform. With powerful analytics, built-in marketing tools, and integration with key marketing automation platforms, Vidyard helps marketers drive results with video content.

Fullscreen

Fullscreen is building a global network of YouTube channels with content creators and brands. Fullscreen provides a full suite of end-to-end YouTube tools and uses the new API for internal, business-intelligence tools.

Learn More

In addition to the documentation, check out our Analytics API playlist to make getting started even easier.

If your goal is to export all statistics for a large number of channels on a recurring basis for your data warehouse, look forward to using the upcoming scheduled reports feature of the API, expected to launch later this year.

To get more info on the YouTube APIs, subscribe to our YouTube for Developers’ channel and YouTubeDev on Google+.

Cheers,

-- Ted Hamilton, Christoph Schwab-Ganser, and the YouTube Analytics API Team

We’re going live from Google I/O

2013-05-09T12:13:00.001-07:00

By Mike Winton, Director of Developer Relations

(Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog)

At Google I/O 2013, we will share the future of our platforms with you. Developers from all over the world are the key innovators of powerful, breakthrough technologies, and that’s why we challenged ourselves to make the Google I/O experience available to every developer, everywhere.

Watch Google I/O live
From the comfort of your own home, office, secret lair, or anywhere you have a reliable Internet connection, you can stream Google I/O May 15-16 live. Brought to you by Google Developers Live (GDL), the Google I/O homepage will become the GDL at I/O live streaming hub starting on May 15th at 9:00 AM PT (16:00 UTC). From this page, you can:

Stream 4 channels of technical content on your computer, tablet, or phone. You’ll feel like you’re right there in the keynote and session rooms, listening to product announcements straight from the source. Live streaming will run on developers.google.com/io from 9 AM PT (16:00 UTC) to 7 PM PT (2:00 UTC) on May 15 and 16.
Watch exclusive interviews with the Googlers behind the latest product announcements. This year, GDL will be on site, broadcasting one-on-one product deep dives, executive interviews, and Sandbox walkthroughs from the GDL stage.
Get the latest news in real-time. We’ll be posting official announcements during I/O. You’ll be able to see the feed on the Google I/O homepage, in the I/O mobile app (coming soon), and on +Google Developers.
Never miss a session. All Google I/O technical sessions will be recorded and posted to GDL and the Google Developers YouTube channel. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for archived session updates.

Live blog the keynote
Grab our live blogging gadget to add the keynote live stream to your own site or blog. Customize the gadget with your site or blog name, live blog alongside real-time Google announcements, and share a dynamic Google I/O experience with your readers. Have questions? For more info, check out our live blogging gadget FAQ.

Get together locally
Experience Google I/O with your local developer community by hosting or attending an I/O Extended event. If you’re hosting, register here and learn how to hold a totally epic event with our handy Organizer Guide. Otherwise, with over 400 sites in 90+ countries, chances are good that there is an I/O Extended event near you. Find an event now!

And before I/O, tune in to Google Developers Live programming to connect with Google engineers, prep for this year’s event, and browse our archived content. For official conference updates, add +Google Developers to your Circles, follow #io13 for big announcements, join the Google I/O community, and keep an eye on the Google I/O site.

Mike Winton founded and leads Google's global Developer Relations organization. He also enjoys spending time with his family and DJing electronic music.

Streaming to YouTube Live? Put an API on it!

2013-05-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

The YouTube Live Streaming API makes it easier to build tools and apps for channels that are enabled to stream live content on YouTube. With the YouTube Live platform, you have the ability to real-time transcode to a range of video qualities that support a broad set of devices and networks, dynamic bandwidth adjustment so viewers automatically see the highest quality stream their network supports, and DVR-like controls to allow viewers to pause, fast forward, and rewind during a live stream.

How to start developing with live streams

The basics

A broadcast represents a live event that you'll stream on YouTube. The API lets you schedule a broadcast, bind it to your live video stream, and update its status to testing, live, or complete.
A stream represents the actual broadcast content.
A cuepoint represents an ad break that can be inserted into a live broadcast. Cuepoints are only available to YouTube content partners.

Documentation

The Getting Started guide explains these concepts in more detail and explains how they interact with other YouTube Data API and YouTube Content ID API resources.
The Life of a Broadcast guide walks you through the typical steps for creating and managing a live broadcast on YouTube.
The YouTube Live Streaming Guide identifies the encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions that the YouTube Live Streaming platform supports.

Sample code and tools

Client libraries for many different programming languages can help you implement the YouTube Live Streaming API as well as many other Google APIs.
Don't write code from scratch! Our Java, PHP, and Python code samples will help you get started.
The APIs Explorer lets you try out sample calls before writing any code.

In addition, in this video, we talk about the philosophy we followed in building the API and also see some great demos from our partners.

Awesome examples

Here are a few great examples from developers already using the API:

Capella’s Cambria Live

Capella’s Cambria Live encodes live broadcasts in real time and streams them to YouTube Live. Cambria Live takes uncompressed broadcast video directly from a camera via SDI or HDMI and compresses it into the H.264 format with AAC audio, ensuring optimal video and audio quality.

Elgato Game Capture HD

Radioline

Elgato Game Capture HD enables you to stream PlayStation or Xbox gameplay to share it with your friends and fans as it happens. Elgato’s video products enable high-quality video recording and conversion for consumers and professionals alike.

Radioline designs and operates a cloud-based mobile internet radio. You can find or discover new radio stations according to their names, genres, areas or according to your favorite playlists.

This API is still experimental, so stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

Cheers,

-- Derek Tan, Satyajeet Salgar, and the YouTube Live Streaming API Team

The Helping Hand of an Expert

2013-04-17T14:17:00.001-07:00

Have you ever been stuck working on a problem only to receive a solution from a friendly person you've never met? Some of the most helpful responses on Stack Overflow and open source code examples have been contributed by our YouTube API community members. The Google Developer Expert (GDE) program is designed to recognize the active and passionate YouTube API developers who make these outstanding contributions.

Each year, Google Developer Experts are selected for their existing accomplishments using Google technologies, their continued passion for these technologies, and their willingness to engage with and mentor other developers.

To learn more about what it’s like to be a GDE, check out this interview with two of our 2013 YouTube API GDEs, Matias Molinas from Argentina and Tim Wintle from the U.K.

If you’d like to share your knowledge, connect with us on +YouTubeDev, contribute to Stack Overflow, and find like-minded developers at your local Google Developer Group (GDG).

Cheers,

—Jarek Wilkiewicz and Jeremy Walker, YouTube API Team

YouTube for Developers on... YouTube!

2013-03-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

For almost a year, we’ve been recording weekly shows for YouTube API developers as part of the Google Developers Live series, hosted on the Google Developers YouTube channel. Now, if you want to get just YouTube API-related videos, check out the new YouTube for Developers channel.

On our new channel, you’ll find an up to date playlist of all our YouTube Developers Live shows (which we’ve also embedded below), as well as other playlists with videos related to the API. We still recommend subscribing to Google Developers as well, especially if you plan to work with multiple Google APIs in your applications.

Not surprisingly, we’re using the YouTube Data API v3 to maintain the YouTube Developers Live playlist, and also to post channel bulletins whenever any video related to YouTube is added to the Google Developers channel. If you’re interested in doing this type of automatic curation in your own channels, you can take a look at the open source Ruby script that does the work for us.

Cheers,

—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Keeping Up with YouTube API Updates

2013-02-06T11:28:00.000-08:00

As the YouTube APIs continue to evolve, release notes are a good place to keep track of improvements. However, with a busy life, you may not remember checking regularly for updates. Now, for the first time, you can subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified as soon as new features are available.

The release notes for all of the YouTube APIs and widgets have their own corresponding RSS feed.
Feeds are available for:

Going forward, we will be pushing updates via RSS for all of the YouTube APIs. Follow our YouTube for Developers Google+ page, and subscribe to the RSS feeds to get the latest API updates!

Cheers,
—Ibrahim Ulukaya, YouTube API Team

No WebView required, with native YouTube Player API for Android

2012-12-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

Adding a high-quality video experience to your Android application just got a whole lot easier. Starting today, you can embed and play YouTube videos in your app using the new YouTube Android Player API.

The API, which was pre-announced at Google I/O 2012, offers these benefits:

High-quality video playback supported on Android 2.2 (Froyo) or newer
Easy integration with your Android application (no WebView required)
Fullscreen and orientation change support
Closed captions display
Support for YouTube ads
Programmatic access, similar to existing Player APIs, to most aspects of the YouTube video playback experience
Integration with the Android YouTube app using a standard set of YouTube Intents

We are launching the API as experimental, though we do not expect major interface changes going forward.

The Only Limit Now is Your Imagination (and ToS)

These instructions explain how to include the YouTubeAndroidPlayerApi.jar client library in your Android application. The library is supported on Android devices running version 4.2.16 or newer of the Android YouTube app.

You can use the YouTubeApiServiceUtil class' isYouTubeApiServiceAvailable method to confirm that a device is compatible.

For a simple embed, use the YouTubeStandalonePlayer. To build a more sophisticated user interface, try the YouTubePlayerView or the YouTubePlayerFragment. Fragments can help create an engaging experience as shown in the Video Wall app example.

Play With These Apps

Here are a few interesting apps available for you to explore:

See everything on Flipboard, all your news and life’s great moments in one place. Now you can watch YouTube videos from wherever you are in Flipboard without leaving the application, providing a more integrated and seamless experience.
BuzzFeed delivers original reporting, scoops, and the hottest social content on the web. Android users can now view their favorite BuzzFeed content featuring YouTube videos in the BuzzFeed app and share with their friends.
9x9.tv enables users to discover and watch curated, topical videos that are organized into TV-like channels. Their blog describes their experience developing with the API.
SoundTracking lets people use their mobile phone or tablet to share their music moments and favorite jams with friends and family. Users can now discover and play YouTube music videos of the songs within their music timeline.
Fitness Flow by Skimble helps you get in shape with high-quality exercise videos led by professional trainers. Skimble uses YouTube to stream workout content on your Android phone and tablets.

Check out a few screen shots below or download the apps from Google Play today!


Flipboard	BuzzFeed	Fitness Flow by Skimble

Learn More

If you would like to learn more about the YouTube Android Player API, the documentation is a great place to start. In addition, we have curated useful videos in this playlist. Please subscribe to the YouTube for Developers' channel to keep up on the latest.

Check Out The Sample Code

We’ve prepared several code examples to make it easy for you to get started with the new API. You will find them on code.google.com. The description of the examples is available in our documentation. If you need additional help with the API feel free to use our support resources.

Cheers,
-- Ross McIlroy, Anton Hansson, and Horia Ciurdar, YouTube Mobile Team

The Simpler, Yet More Powerful New YouTube Data API

2012-12-14T14:07:00.000-08:00

Since its initial launch in 2007, the YouTube Data API has become one of Google’s most popular APIs by request volume, thanks to the awesome apps from developers like you. To help you make better integrated video experiences, you can now use the YouTube API version 3.0. The new API is easy to use thanks to rich client library support, improved tooling, reference documentation and integration with Google’s common API infrastructure. Version 3.0 only returns what you ask for and is using JSON rather than XML encoding for greater efficiency. The API introduces new core functionality including Freebase integration via topics, and universal search. If you develop social media management apps, you’ll love channel bulletin post and full subscriber list management, also new in this release. Version 3.0 of the API constitutes the API's biggest overhaul to date and we’re eager for you to try it today!

New Functionality: Topics, Universal Search, and Audience Engagement Support

Have you ever tried to search for YouTube videos only to find out that keyword search can produce ambiguous results? With the new Topics API, thanks to the power of Freebase, you can find exactly what you’re looking for by specifying Freebase topic IDs rather than search keywords.

For example, if you’re reading this post from outside of the US and would like to search for content related to football, /m/02vx4 is probably the topic ID you're after. The API's universal search feature lets you retrieve channels, playlists and videos matching the topic with just one request like this one. Find out more in our Topics API Guide.

Version 3.0 introduces better tools to engage and interact with one’s YouTube audience. Social media management apps can now help content creators communicate with their channel subscribers using buletin posts.

Efficiency, Client Libraries, Better Tooling and More!

To help you reduce your app’s bandwidth requirements version 3.0 only returns the information you ask for as specified by the “part” parameter.

While the default JSON encoding in version 3.0 is more efficient than XML in version 2.0, if parsing JSON isn’t your thing, check out the client libraries for .NET, Dart, Go, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP, Python and Ruby. The libraries use OAuth 2.0 authorization and work with the YouTube API as well as other modern Google APIs thus simplifying your application.

The familiar Google API tools such as the API console work with YouTube API version 3.0 without any extra hassles. Additionally, our API reference documentation now allows you to scroll down to the bottom of any reference page to try the API. You can also or visit the standalone API Explorer to browse a list of supported methods.

App Examples

Even though version 3.0 is still experimental, a number of exciting new apps are already using it. Let’s look at a few examples:

Showyou, an app that makes it easy to watch the Internet, integrated the Topics API to enable users to discover related videos after tapping on topics associated with the Showyou feed.

Argentina-based Interesante integrated the Topics API to determine the Freebase topic of videos being shared. Interesante used this to serve interest-based video recommendations.

FanBridge, a company specializing in growing and managing one’s fan base, recently introduced channel bulletin post functionality with scheduled posts support.

Tubular Labs, which focuses on YouTube audience development, uses subscriber list to help content creators develop a better understanding of their audiences.

Pixability, a company specializing in YouTube marketing software, was able to quickly port their Online Video Grader to the YouTube API version 3.0 thanks to the new Python client library.

Learn More

If you would like to learn more about the YouTube API version 3.0, in addition to the API documentation, the material curated in this playlist is a great place to start. Please subscribe to the YouTube for Developers' channel to keep up on the latest.

Use The Source, Luke!

Since the most fun way to work with it is to try it, we’ve prepared a few code examples in Python and JavaScript to get you started. For a more comprehensive client-side app using the Topics API, try the Topics Explorer. You can find its source code on code.google.com.

Cheers,
-- Raul Furnică, Vladimir Vuskovic and Pepijn Crouzen, YouTube API Team

ClientLogin using Google Accounts

2012-12-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

Long-time readers might remember a blog post from a while back entitled “ClientLogin #FAIL”, in which we covered the myriad ways in which your ClientLogin authorization attempts might result in an error. Even though ClientLogin has been officially deprecated since April 2012, and even though we’ve been recommending that developers switch to OAuth 2 for longer than that, we know there are still a good number of legacy applications out there that still rely on ClientLogin.

If you are a developer of such an application, there’s another thing that you (and your users) will need to start watching out for: at some point in the future, we will start requiring that the username parameter passed to ClientLogin (i.e. what’s referred to as the Email= value in the ClientLogin request) correspond to the full email address of the Google Account that’s associated with an underlying YouTube channel. We’ve supported using Google Account email addresses with ClientLogin for many years now, ever since we started linking Google Accounts to YouTube channels, but old habits die hard, and many users still use YouTube usernames.

We haven’t yet determined a date for when we still stop supporting ClientLogin with YouTube usernames and will provide additional details when we know more about when it will take place. However, if you use ClientLogin, it’s not too early to start encouraging your application’s users to start providing their Google Account email addresses instead of their YouTube usernames when logging in. If you have the ability to update your existing application’s user interface, we recommend doing so to indicate that the username field should take a Google Account email address. If you have any online help materials or technical support for your software, update them to ensure that users know to provide their Google Account email address.

Users who log in via the YouTube.com web interface, or who go through the AuthSub, OAuth 1, or OAuth 2 web authorization flows will soon be required to use their Google Account email address instead of their YouTube username as well. This web-based transition will take place well before we deprecate YouTube usernames for ClientLogin, and it should be transparent to developers since Google controls the user interface for these flows. For more information, see this help center article.

As mentioned, we’ll have a follow-up post in coming months with more details about exactly when we’ll stop supporting YouTube usernames with ClientLogin. That post will also communicate the exact error message that ClientLogin will return when a YouTube username is used. We’d like to close with one more plea: ClientLogin is deprecated, and is technically inferior to OAuth 2 in a number of important ways. Our new Google APIs client libraries provide first-class OAuth 2 integration that developers can take advantage of in their new code, or back port to their existing code. You will be doing your users a service and making their accounts more secure by transitioning from ClientLogin to OAuth 2.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Using WebM to power the YouTube app for Nintendo Wii

2012-11-15T12:26:00.002-08:00

When we began building the new YouTube app for Nintendo Wii, we wanted to make video playback smooth and beautiful. This meant squeezing the most available power from the console CPU and fitting the video decoding process within the tight bounds of available memory. After trying out several video encoding formats on Wii, we found that 360p WebM encoding performed the best. With the largest install base of current generation consoles, YouTube on Wii is the largest deployment of WebM video in the world today.

WebM is particularly well-suited to devices where available memory is limited, because of its technical approach to video encoding. VP8, the video codec in WebM, uses reference frames (called alternative reference frames, or "alt-ref") from which adjacent video frames are derived and compressed. This type of compression is commonly used in modern video encoding schemes, but VP8 uses the technique with particular efficiency, which results in a smaller memory footprint and smoother video playback on Wii.

We went one step further and performed low-level optimization of the VP8 decoder specifically tuned to the Wii’s processor. This included: using paired-single floating point operations to perform motion compensation, loop filtering, and idct; using the GPU to do color conversion and scaling; and dcbz instructions to copy buffers. This kind of optimization is available to anyone, as the VP8 code is open source under a BSD license.

We’ll keep looking into other ways we can use WebM, so stay tuned on this blog to learn more.

Fritz Koenig, Engineer, recently watched Phantogram - "Don't Move", and Matt Darby, Product Manager, recently watched “JP Auclair Street Segment.”

Upcoming HTTPS Certificate Change

2012-11-13T07:38:00.001-08:00

If you’re a developer who uses the YouTube API, and if you make your requests to the API using HTTPS, there’s an upcoming change that you should be aware of. Sometime in early 2013, Google will be changing the certificates used for establishing secure HTTPS connections to all of our servers, in what we anticipate will be a backwards-compatible manner. Still, since there are so many slight differences in HTTPS client implementations, we encourage you to test your existing code in advance of this change and to report any issues that you do encounter.

To confirm compatability today in advance of the production change, you can make test API requests to stage.gdata.youtube.com and uploads.stage.gdata.youtube.com using version 1, 2, or 2.1 of the Data API, as described in this blog post about our staging environment. The new certificates are already in place on those servers. Be sure that you’re using https:// as the protocol.

Update (May 1, 2013): stage.gdata.youtube.com and uploads.stage.gdata.youtube.com have gone back to having the same certificate setup as the production GData API servers.

If you’re using HTTP instead of HTTPS to access the YouTube Data API then you also won’t be affected by the new security certificates—but you really should start using HTTPS!

Developers who still rely on ClientLogin for handling authorization (which we also don’t recommend) have one additional thing to test, even if your actual YouTube API requests don’t use HTTPS: ClientLogin requests are made https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin. Because we do not have a staging domain name set up for www.google.com, the recommended way of testing ClientLogin in advance of the certificate change is to hardcode the IP address 74.125.130.105 for the domain name www.google.com in the /etc/hosts file of your computer. Be sure to remove that entry when you’re done testing.

We don’t yet have a specific date in mind for making the switch in production, and when we do, it will be added as an update to this blog post. Please don’t wait until the last minute to test your code, though!

Update (March 2013): There is now a certificate test environment set up for developers who are using the YouTube Data API v3 or the YouTube Analytics API. Instead of using the normal www.googleapis.com hostname associated with those APIs, the test environment can be reached at cert-test.googleapis.com. Please do not use this environment for any production traffic, or expect it to have 100% uptime. Once the SSL migration is complete, it will be taken offline.

The exact mechanics of sending requests to the test environment vary depending on which language's client library you're using. For Java, you can make a call to setRootUrl("https://cert-test.googleapis.com/") on your YouTube.Builder object. For Python, you can set the optional discoveryServiceUrl property when constructing your client: apiclient.discovery.build("youtube", "v3", discoveryServiceUrl="https://cert-test.googleapis.com//discovery/v1/apis/youtube/v3/rest"). Similar approaches can be used for other languages.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Cool YouTube apps from Google I/O 2012

2012-09-28T14:17:00.001-07:00

We're constantly amazed at the innovative ways that developers incorporate YouTube into their applications. At Google I/O this year, 12 partners (over 30% from outside the U.S.) demonstrated their apps in the YouTube section of the Developer Sandbox, a demo area highlighting applications based on technologies and products featured at I/O.

Google's own Daniel Sieberg, an Emmy-nominated journalist, interviewed some of our partners about their use of the YouTube APIs.

With Daniel’s hectic schedule, he only had time to interview a handful of our great partners. With that in mind, we highlighted all the awesome apps showcased by our partners at the YouTube API Developer Sandbox.

Business.me (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview	Business.me, headquartered in Singapore, is the place to share and discover videos about business. They have created a video-sharing site to help producers of business videos reach their audience. The site also helps business professionals discover relevant business information in video format.
Fun Fact	Oscar Moreno, CEO, not only holds Business and Law degrees, he helped launch several startups (Business.me, Netjuice, Keldoo, and Tuenti).

Code Hero (YouTube Data API)

Overview	Code Hero teaches you to code through a fun, 3D game. Become a code hero and shape the future!
Fun Fact	The Code Hero Team implemented the recording mechanism in the game that exports to YouTube at a 3 day hackathon! Bonus: The game has sharks with lasers attached to their heads!

Flipboard (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview	See everything on Flipboard, all your news and life’s great moments in one place. Using the YouTube Data API, Flipboard lets users discover, rate, share, and comment on top videos from YouTube. In addition, users can access their own videos and subscriptions, and subscribe to other YouTube users.
Fun Fact	Flipboard launched an Android app one week before I/O with a YouTube and Google+ integration!

LOOT Entertainment by Sony DADC (YouTube Data API)

Overview Gather your friends and set up your own production crew inside PlayStation®Home! What will you be? Director? Actor? Cinematographer? Extra? Try them all! Check out the amazing Machinima tools to help you record, light and build your film or television sets! What will you make?

Fun Fact LOOT gives you tons of sets to make your own movies (machinima) on the PS3, including a Ghostbusters Firehouse Stage Set!

Moviecom.tv (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview A simple and easy online video platform for businesses. Record, centralize and share instantly. Moviecom.tv also allows you to link directly to your YouTube account through the YouTube APIs.

Fun Fact The founders flew all the way from Glasgow to attend Google I/O!

Parrot (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview The Parrot AR.Drone is a quadricopter that can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet. Get more out of your AR.Drone with the AR.Drone Academy. Keep track of all your flights on the Academy map. Watch your best videos with added statistical feedback and directly share online with pilots from all over the world!

Fun Fact Parrot makes remote controlled flying devices that can record and track their flights!

PicoTube - Vettl, Inc. (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview Picotube uses content from YouTube and allows users to create avatars, watch clips together, create playlists, and rate videos selected by other video jockeys.

Fun Fact Picotube was the Grand Prix winner of TechCrunch Tokyo 2011!

Skimble (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API, and new Android Player API)

Overview Here to power the mobile fitness movement, Skimble offers fun, dynamic and social applications for everyone. Available now are Skimble's Workout Trainer and GPS Sports Tracker apps that help motivate people to get and stay active. Skimble uses the YouTube Player API to display fitness videos.

Fun Fact Co-founder Maria Ly got the crowd moving at one of YouTube’s Google I/O Sessions!

Squrl (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview Squrl is a great place to watch and discover video. Know what videos are trending, receive recommendations on what to watch and see what your friends are watching.

Fun Fact Co-founders Mark Gray and Michael Hoydich also founded the successful software development company IndustryNext together in 2004!

Telestream (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview Telestream demonstrated Wirecast for YouTube, a live video production and streaming product, which was developed specifically for Google YouTube partners. Telestream specializes in products that make it possible to get video content to any audience regardless of how the content is created, distributed or viewed (entire process).

Fun Fact Telestream’s NASCAR Project won the IBC2012 Innovation Award!

Vidcaster (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview VidCaster is a video site creation platform that allows you to create a video portal instantly from your existing video library on YouTube or other video hosts. Choose from a beautiful set of designer themes and customize to your heart's content using VidCaster's powerful template language.

Fun Fact Kieran Farr, CEO and co-founder, used to drive a taxi full-time in San Francisco before becoming a successful entrepreneur!

WeVideo (YouTube Data API)

Overview WeVideo is a cloud-based video editing suite that allows easy, full-featured, collaborative HD video editing across Google Drive, Chromebooks, and Android devices.

Fun Fact WeVideo partnered with Marvel and YouTube to allow fans to create their own trailers!

YouTube Channels: Get with the Program!

2012-09-24T12:57:00.003-07:00

It's never been easier to create compelling videos and build a social presence on YouTube. At this year's Google I/O, YouTube product managers and channel gurus Dror and A.J. presented tips and tricks for making great content centered around raising brand awareness, raising money, and obtaining feedback about your products and services.

Don't worry if you missed their talk, we recorded it! So, sit back, grab some popcorn, and get ready to learn how to showcase your brand in front of YouTube's 800 million unique visitors per month!

Click here to view the slides from the video above.

Not sold yet? Well, have a sneak peek at some of the great material they cover below, and remember Dror and A.J.’s number one recommendation: make content, not commercials!

Sneak Peek

Tips and Tricks

Hook the user in the first 15 seconds (or they'll leave)
Brand your channel!
Make the most of your budget

Review YouTube’s Trends for ideas
Camera shy? Consider animation. (It might actually be cheaper than video.)
Several successful channels focus on curating videos from their community
Enhance your videos without fancy software/hardware using the YouTube Editor or other integrated web editors

Many, many more...

What's your goal?

Raising awareness

Master your PR via video (include all your features and make bloggers’ lives easier)
Provide product/service demo videos to promote your company
Tell backstories about clients using your products/services

Raising money

Add video to your crowdfunding pitch to increase funds raised by 114% (source: Indiegogo)

Researching and supporting users

Record tutorials to promote and educate (see which features are the most popular using YouTube’s Analytics... you might be surprised)
Use Google Hangouts for scalable office hours and virtual focus groups
Figure out what features customers like/dislike via the world’s largest focus group

Resources to learn more

Creator Hub
Creator Playbook (what you wish you knew about YouTube)
Trends Dashboard
YouTube for Developers (that’s us)

Wow, you made it this far without watching the video? Did we tell you they fill the presentation with awesome videos that showcase their points (including Chuck Testa)? Nope!? Well, now you know, and you will definitely want to watch the whole thing!

-Jeremy Walker, YouTube API Team

The YouTube API on Stack Overflow

2012-09-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

Many of you are already familiar with the terrific Stack Overflow website, which has become the de facto resource on the web for all types of programming questions. And many of you have been asking YouTube API questions on Stack Overflow for some time now, but haven’t received any official responses from the YouTube API Developer Relations team. That’s because, for the past five years or so, our focus has been on providing developer support via our dedicated Google Group. We’ve decided that instead of continuing to maintain a dedicated Google Group for YouTube API questions, it would help more users if we focused on responding to Stack Overflow posts.

We encourage all developers who have questions about the YouTube API to start posting on Stack Overflow today using the tag youtube-api. You can use this new question template to pre-populate the tag for you so that you don’t forget. While we’ll do our best to find and answer relevant questions that aren’t tagged with youtube-api, you’d be making our job easier (and you’d get a quicker answer) if you tag things correctly from the get-go.

Stack Overflow prides itself in being a destination for questions and answers, and not a place to file bug reports or feature requests. We ask that developers do not post on Stack Overflow for those sorts of things, and instead make use of the templates we have for filing a bug or filing a feature request in our existing public issue tracker. (Be sure to check the list of existing open issues before filing a duplicate.)

On October 15, we’ll be switching the existing discussion Google Group into archive-only mode, meaning that it will no longer accept any new posts. You don’t have to wait until October 15 to start asking questions on Stack Overflow or to file reports in the issue tracker, though.

For those developers who mainly “lurked” in the discussion Google Group and used it as a way of getting official announcements about the YouTube API, we have a number of other communication channels to recommend. Subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed is a great idea, for instance. You can also follow us on Google+ at http://google.com/+YouTubeDev. If you’d like to submit a question to one of our weekly YouTube Developers Live broadcasts, you can do that for the next upcoming scheduled show. Finally, for those who prefer to get updates via email, we will be keeping the announce-only Google Group active, and we’ll continue to post important messages there.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Video Tags: Just for Uploaders

2012-08-28T08:54:00.001-07:00

Update: This change also applies to <category scheme="http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007/keywords.cat"> tags, which were not mentioned in the original announcement.

If you follow the YouTube Creator Blog, you might have recently seen a post announcing that video tags (also known as keywords) would no longer be displayed to viewers of a video on YouTube’s website. They aren’t going away from the video itself, though—the owner of the video can still create tags for new videos and edit tags for existing videos, and video tags will still provide an important signal used to surface relevant results when searching for videos.

We’re going to be making some corresponding changes to all versions of the YouTube Data API to mimic this behavior in API responses. Starting later today, August 28, on the staging server and September 4 on the production server, any time you get a video entry back from any API method, it will have an empty <media:keywords/> element. This is a valid response from the API that your application should already handle gracefully, since videos are not required to have any keywords to begin with.

The exception to this rule is when you make authenticated requests to the API, and you request a video entry that’s owned by the currently authorized user. In that scenario, you will get back a <media:keywords> element that contains the full list of tags for the video, and you can read, update, or remove those video tags using the standard API operations.

Important: If your application allows video owners to update the metadata of their videos, please ensure that you include the proper Authorization header for both read and write operations. Otherwise, you could accidentally return an empty list of video tags when retrieving an existing video, and end up overwriting the video’s tags if you update the metadata. Video tags continue to play an important role in helping viewers discover your videos when searching on YouTube.com or via the API, so if your application does support metadata editing, please make sure you allow owners to tag their videos properly.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

PLaylists: now with more PL

2012-08-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

If you ever pay attention to your browser’s location bar, you may have noticed that, for a while now, the YouTube.com website has used playlist IDs that are prefixed with the characters “PL” when constructing the URLs for playlist pages. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72CF07D200AA2AFA is one example of that. This practice of prepended playlist IDs previously didn’t extend over to the Data API—PL72CF07D200AA2AFA would not have been recognized as a valid playlist ID, but 72CF07D200AA2AFA would have.

Starting later today, Wednesday, August 22, the YouTube Data API will accept playlist IDs with the “PL” prefix whenever they’re used as metadata or in API request URLs. In most responses, the API will return playlist IDs with “PL” prefixes. The one exception is that for the next few days, searching for playlists will return playlist ids without the “PL” prefix. This will change on Tuesday, August 28, at which point the “PL” prefix will be included in playlist search results as well.

While we will continue to support using unprefixed playlist IDs as metadata or in API request URLs for the time being, at some point in the future we may require the “PL” prefix to be used whenever a playlist ID is provided. We’ll provide additional guidance if we do decide to stop supporting requests with unprefixed playlist IDs.

This change should be backwards compatible, but if you’re currently manipulating or comparing the playlist IDs that are returned via the API in any way, or making any assumptions about the length of the ID (which you shouldn't be), please make sure that your code will handle IDs that contain the “PL” prefix.

If you have any questions about this changes, please let us know in our developer forum.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

Party Playlist Picker: An experimental project written in Python

2012-08-14T13:39:00.001-07:00

When Google+ first came out, we were really excited about the idea of writing some open source code to showcase how you could integrate YouTube with Google+. After some brainstorming, we came up with the idea of letting people collaboratively edit a playlist in realtime, and we started hacking!

We started working on Party Playlist Picker in early 2011. We’ve always wanted to release our experiment as an open source project, and you can now download the code to see one example of integrating Google+ functionality to enrich a YouTube application.

Party Playlist Picker is a Google App Engine application written in Python. It uses a Google+ share button so that partygoers can invite their friends to come edit a playlist in realtime. That feature is based on the Google App Engine channel API. It makes use of the gdata-python-client library to talk to YouTube and the google-api-python-client library to talk to Google+. It’s currently using version 1 of the YouTube API (because that’s what gdata-python-client uses), and we used OAuth 2 for authentication. In fact, we made good use of the Python client library to manage the OAuth 2 tokens for us automatically.

There’s also a lot of jQuery-based JavaScript goodness. For instance, you can search for videos without reloading the page, and you can simply drag them to add them to the playlist. If multiple people edit the page at the same time, the list of videos is updated in realtime whenever a change is made. You can also watch videos right on the page. Last of all, it keeps track of who’s edited the playlist, and whether they’re currently editing it.

There are a bunch of subtle HTML5 tricks thrown in as well. For instance, the application supports voice search, and we made a clever use of gradients to fade overflow text in the video descriptions.

Here’s a screenshot of the application:

If you’re interested in learning more, you can play around with a running version of it, or you can download the source code and hack away! If you have any questions, post them to our developer forum.

Update: Watch JJ, Jeff, and Danny Hermes (from the App Engine Developer Relations team) talk about Party Playlist Picker as part of YouTube Developers Live:

Cheers,
--Shannon -jj Behrens and Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

Build Compelling Experiences Using YouTube Embeds With The IFrame Player API

2012-07-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

If you've hesitated to use the <iframe> player in your app due to the IFrame Player API's experimental status, then wait no more. We've removed that API's 'experimental' tag, which means the API is production-ready and is covered by YouTube's deprecation policy. Since the <iframe> embed is the default way of sharing YouTube videos on the Web, the IFrame Player API is now the recommended mechanism to control video playback behavior in your Web applications.

To provide a consistent developer experience with the YouTube Upload Widget, we’ve changed the the URL for loading the IFrame Player API code to https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api. The old URL (http://www.youtube.com/player_api) is now deprecated, though it will continue to work. Similarly, the iframe API initialization callback name has been changed to onYouTubeIframeAPIReady from onYouTubePlayerAPIReady, also for consistency with the YouTube Upload Widget. The old callback name, onYouTubePlayerAPIReady, is now deprecated as well. If your app uses both the YouTube Upload Widget as well as the IFrame Player API, you only need to include the script once and handle a single initialization callback.

Going forward, we'll continue making improvements to the IFrame API and make it work better with mobile platforms. As before, you can find the details about the API in our documentation and ask questions about it on our developer forum.

Cheers,
--Jarek Wilkiewicz, YouTube API Team

Know What’s Loaded?

2012-07-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever developed a custom playback experience based on our Player API, you’ve probably used the getVideoBytesLoaded() and getVideoBytesTotal() methods to determine how much the current video is locally buffered and the size of the entire video. After obtaining this information, the next logical step is to divide the number of bytes loaded by the total number of bytes to obtain the fraction of the video that’s been buffered, which you can then display in your custom user interface.

Instead of taking this two-step approach to calculate how much of a video has buffered, we encourage you to use the new getVideoLoadedFraction() method. It will return a numerical value between 0.0 and 1.0 that represents the same fraction obtained by dividing getVideoBytesLoaded() by getVideoBytesTotal(). While those two legacy methods still work today, they are now officially deprecated, as per the terms of our deprecation policy.

getVideoLoadedFraction() allows us to expose more accurate information to your code about the state of the video that’s currently playing across a wider range of playback scenarios. When HTML5 <video> playback was used in the <iframe> Player, for instance, we previously had to return “fake” values for getVideoBytesLoaded() and getVideoBytesTotal(), as the true byte counts weren’t directly exposed via the <video> element. The value returned by getVideoLoadedFraction() should be correct for that and other playback scenarios that we roll out in the future.

If you have any questions about the new method or anything else related to the YouTube APIs, please let us know in the developer forum.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

Let’s Hear It From Your Users!

2012-07-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years we’ve heard two specific pieces of feedback from the YouTube API community:

Developers have clamored for years for a way of embedding a webcam YouTube upload widget on their web pages, similar to the webcam upload tool available at youtube.com/my_webcam.
Developers who have used YouTube Direct in the past have asked for a simpler solution that doesn’t require the same level of technical expertise to set up and manage.

Knowing about this demand made us particularly excited for our Google I/O announcements of the YouTube Upload Widget that supports webcam uploads, and YouTube Direct Lite, both of which are now available for public use.

YouTube Upload Widget
Using the YouTube Upload Widget on your site is as simple as adding an <iframe> to your HTML, like so:

<iframe id="widget" type="text/html" width="640" height="390" src="https://www.youtube.com/upload_embed" frameborder="0">

Developers who want more control over the uploads experience can use a full JavaScript API to initiate the widget, and listen for events related to the upload.

YouTube Direct Lite
YouTube Direct Lite is a complete rewrite of the existing YouTube Direct platform. The goal of the project remains the same: make it possible to solicit videos from your users and then moderate those submissions into standard YouTube playlists for display. The difference is that YouTube Direct Lite is implemented purely in client-side HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and unlike with YouTube Direct, no Java App Engine deployment is needed. You can download the YouTube Direct Lite code, customize it, and deploy it on your own web server along with the rest of your site’s content. To make things even easier, we’re hosting a canonical deployment of YouTube Direct Lite that you could include on your pages without having to deploy anything at all—just add the appropriate <iframe> tag to your page.

You can find a live example of YouTube Direct Lite integration, including the use of the YouTube Upload Widget, on this sample page. Feel free to use that page to submit a video letting us know how you plan on using the new tools.

Bringing the YouTube Upload Widget and YouTube Direct Lite to web developers and community maintainers will give you new tools to hear from (and see!) your community, and who knows what great things will come from that!

Cheers,
—Eric Lundberg, Jeff Posnick and Vladimir Vuskovic, YouTube API Team

YouTube @ the Google Developers Academy

2012-07-12T12:29:00.001-07:00

Whether you’re a fledgling developer looking to get started with an API or a skilled developer who wants to learn some new tricks, you’ll find engaging material at the Google Developers Academy. Of particular interest to readers of this blog is the YouTube section, which hosts courses specific to the YouTube APIs.

The first course walks JavaScript developers through the steps needed to embed an <iframe> Player on their page along with a list of chapter titles. It’s perfect when you want to embed a lengthy video that consists of multiple sub-sections, since jumping from section to section is as easy as clicking on predefined links. Check out the live demo of a page with videos from last year’s Google I/O conference to see the player in action.

We will be gradually adding to the YouTube section of the Google Developers Academy, and we’ll announce the new courses on this blog and our YouTube for Developers Google+ page. Stay tuned for more great resources!

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

All Good Things Must Come to an end=

2012-06-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

If you enjoy the ability to easily start video playback at a specific time using the start parameter, you may also like being able to stop it early. Here’s an example:


<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Nc9xq-TVyHI?start=110&end=119"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The end parameter is a positive integer, and it represents the number of seconds from the beginning of the video. If your friends are not into merengue dancing canines, you can now tease them with short clips of videos like the one below:

Cheers,
--Jarek Wilkiewicz, YouTube API Team

Build awesome YouTube experiences with new APIs and tools

2012-06-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

When we introduced the first YouTube API in 2005, we knew that it would be developers who would help us grow YouTube as a platform for connecting the world through video. At this year’s Google I/O, we’re continuing on with that mission through an entire track dedicated to YouTube, where we’re announcing new APIs and developer tools, as
well as a showcase of some of the most innovative apps built with YouTube.

Make mobile video shine
With mobile video now making up as much as half of all mobile traffic, your mobile experience needs video that’s high quality, fast and sleek. We want to give you the best tools to build these experiences, so we’re previewing the new YouTube Android Player API for high-quality and fluid video playback.

Engage with your communities through video
The next generation of YouTube Direct allows you to engage with your community by having them submit videos which you can then feature in playlists. YouTube Direct Lite is implemented in client-side JavaScript using CORS, and does not require any server-side deployments—adding it to your site is as simple as adding an

MMMmmm...data!Retrieving analytics data for your videos used to mean downloading an archive of CSV files that you then had to process. Now, you can use our new YouTube Analytics API to build custom tools for your data. It's a RESTful web service that gives you the freedom to request customized reports containing only the data you care about. We’re also giving the YouTube Data API a facelift with new features like universal search and updated client libraries in 8 different languages.

Play, watch and learn from developers like you at Google I/O

We’ll be talking about these new features and other developer tools at Google I/O this week, so check out our sessions and codelabs, download the official Google I/O app, and follow online at developers.google.com/io. At I/O you can also visit with Developer Sandbox companies like Flipboard, Dude Perfect and SONY PlayStation @ Home who are building awesome experiences with YouTube APIs. We’ll also share our sessions on the Google Developers YouTube Channel, and you can always find us on Google+ and our developer forum.

Cheers,
—Amanda Surya, YouTube API Team

Google I/O 101: YouTube for Your Business

2012-06-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

In preparation for Google I/O, we've created a presentation for people who've never integrated with YouTube before. This video tutorial is an introduction to YouTube and its APIs with an emphasis on how you can use them for your business. It includes examples for technical and nontechnical audiences.

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team

Google I/O 101: Using Ruby on Rails and YouTube for Education

2012-06-26T05:25:00.003-07:00

Update (July 2012): The sample application demonstrated in this video, Quizzimoto, is now open source.

As a reader of this blog, you already know that YouTube offers APIs, and you probably also know that video is one of the most powerful communication mechanisms for instilling knowledge. Now you can combine the two! In this video tutorial, we'll show you that YouTube and Ruby on Rails are a great fit for building interesting educational apps. Along the way, we'll also cover OAuth2, the various client libraries for Ruby, and using test-driven development with RESTful web APIs.

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team

Overview	Gather your friends and set up your own production crew inside PlayStation®Home! What will you be? Director? Actor? Cinematographer? Extra? Try them all! Check out the amazing Machinima tools to help you record, light and build your film or television sets! What will you make?
Fun Fact	LOOT gives you tons of sets to make your own movies (machinima) on the PS3, including a Ghostbusters Firehouse Stage Set!

Overview	A simple and easy online video platform for businesses. Record, centralize and share instantly. Moviecom.tv also allows you to link directly to your YouTube account through the YouTube APIs.
Fun Fact	The founders flew all the way from Glasgow to attend Google I/O!

Overview	The Parrot AR.Drone is a quadricopter that can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet. Get more out of your AR.Drone with the AR.Drone Academy. Keep track of all your flights on the Academy map. Watch your best videos with added statistical feedback and directly share online with pilots from all over the world!
Fun Fact	Parrot makes remote controlled flying devices that can record and track their flights!

Overview	Picotube uses content from YouTube and allows users to create avatars, watch clips together, create playlists, and rate videos selected by other video jockeys.
Fun Fact	Picotube was the Grand Prix winner of TechCrunch Tokyo 2011!

Overview	Here to power the mobile fitness movement, Skimble offers fun, dynamic and social applications for everyone. Available now are Skimble's Workout Trainer and GPS Sports Tracker apps that help motivate people to get and stay active. Skimble uses the YouTube Player API to display fitness videos.
Fun Fact	Co-founder Maria Ly got the crowd moving at one of YouTube’s Google I/O Sessions!

Overview	Squrl is a great place to watch and discover video. Know what videos are trending, receive recommendations on what to watch and see what your friends are watching.
Fun Fact	Co-founders Mark Gray and Michael Hoydich also founded the successful software development company IndustryNext together in 2004!

Overview	Telestream demonstrated Wirecast for YouTube, a live video production and streaming product, which was developed specifically for Google YouTube partners. Telestream specializes in products that make it possible to get video content to any audience regardless of how the content is created, distributed or viewed (entire process).
Fun Fact	Telestream’s NASCAR Project won the IBC2012 Innovation Award!

Overview	VidCaster is a video site creation platform that allows you to create a video portal instantly from your existing video library on YouTube or other video hosts. Choose from a beautiful set of designer themes and customize to your heart's content using VidCaster's powerful template language.
Fun Fact	Kieran Farr, CEO and co-founder, used to drive a taxi full-time in San Francisco before becoming a successful entrepreneur!

Overview	WeVideo is a cloud-based video editing suite that allows easy, full-featured, collaborative HD video editing across Google Drive, Chromebooks, and Android devices.
Fun Fact	WeVideo partnered with Marvel and YouTube to allow fans to create their own trailers!