Yesterday my RSS reader lit up with posts about a “big announcement from YouTube tomorrow”. Many were hoping the announcement would be about live video streaming since Steve Chen made a comment about this at a YouTube party recently. But when the news broke today it was about a new API and many were disappointed, but I was thrilled.

Now with these new APIs you can literally make your own interface to YouTube and have access to all their data and even customize the YouTube player to match your site’s design. I already have a project in mind that I’d like to use some of this functionality for.

Also look for Geoff Stearns talking about the new player in the video below. Geoff Stearns is the creator of SWFObject and I believe he hinted at these new features in a comment on his blog a few weeks ago where he said “Let’s just say you may be pleasantly surprised next week.”. This was in response to a comment about YouTube’s player.

This is a great move on YouTube’s part and I’m looking forward to seeing what developers will create from this new API/Data features.

List of new features ( Read the entire blog post here )

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

Watch the video announcement

1. YouTube Releases New API Features - Find Motive Says:
   March 12th, 2008 at 10:30 am

   […] wrote a post about YouTube’s new API features. Here is an […]