March 12th, 2008
YouTube: Broadcast Yourself, Anywhere
By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
Rumors flew yesterday about today’s YouTube announcement. Some thought it would be high-definition videos (long desired); others thought it would be a deal with Hulu (which would have been cool). The real announcement was an opening up of YouTube, turning it into a service that could power your own application, site, whatever, via new APIs.
No longer, for example, will you have to embed YouTube’s own player and its branding; you’ll even be able to upload videos and more.
According to the blog post announcement, these are the new APIs, which “build upon our existing APIs for querying the YouTube library and playing embedded YouTube videos”:
- 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
Google also posted a series of “case studies” indicating how partners have already begun using these APIs. Examples include:
- Electronic Arts enables players to capture videos of user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly into YouTube.
- The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube.
- Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube.
More at the above link. And it also means you can expect announcements from these partners and others in the near future.
Update: The first of those announcements has come in, with TiVo announcing YouTube support. It had been alluded to in the YouTube press release, but not detailed.
steveking says:
YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.
YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.
Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.
Product page: 3w.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: 3w.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
Company web-site: 3w.youtuberobot.com
E-mail: support@youtuberobot.com
May 5th, 2008 at 12:48 am