Test drive the YouTube APIs

Since the launch of the new YouTube for Developers site, you’ve been able to access API resources, see the showcase apps and hear the stories of successful YouTube Developers. With today’s addition of four new demos, you’ll be able to play with the APIs and find use cases you can easily adapt into your own application.

Upload Widget

The Upload Widget demo uses the YouTube Data API, resumable uploads, YouTube Upload Widget, and the YouTube iFrame Player API. Inspired by globalfeed.org, it lets visitors upload videos in which they answer a few questions. On the first page, users can also see answers uploaded by others.

Upload Widget

Topic Explorer

Via the Freebase API and the YouTube Data API, the Topic Explorer helps visitors find videos related to queries using the Google Knowledge Graph. After the initial query search on Freebase, users can select the exact entity on the Google Knowledge Graph and find videos related to the entity rather than to the simple search term. They can then watch these videos in a player that uses the YouTube iFrame API.

Topic Explorer

Analytics

By using the YouTube Analytics API, viewers can see the geographic distribution of viewers for Google Developer videos during Google I/O 2013. They can slide through different dates to change the statistics. They can also hover over continents to find the exact viewcounts and the most popular videos for that continent for the selected date.

Analytics

Live Widget

With the power of the YouTube Live Streaming API and the YouTube Data API, visitors can see the most popular YouTube live streams right now. They can click the titles of streams to watch them in a player, which uses the YouTube iFrame API, or simply click one of the empty time slots in the last row to schedule their own broadcasts in the calendar.

Live Widget

Stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

—Ibrahim Ulukaya, Danny Reed, Corrie Appelbaum and the YouTube for Developers team

Introducing YouTube developer stories

Over the years, we have seen many amazing applications built using the YouTube APIs. These applications span different verticals and extend YouTube to a broader audience. We invited four developers to share their stories and give you inspiration for your work.

Fullscreen

Fullscreen helps creators and brands supercharge their online presence by building tools on top of YouTube data.

Tubular Labs

A great video is nothing without an audience. Tubular helps YouTube creators and marketers grow their audience and take them to the next level.

Capella Systems

Using the power of YouTube, Capella builds live streaming software that makes broadcasting a breeze.

Kamcord

Kamcord helps mobile gamers capture their favorite moments and share them with the world via YouTube.

Stay tuned for more YouTube developer stories in the future, visit YouTube.com/developers to learn more about YouTube APIs and start your own story.

-Amanda Surya and the YouTube for Developers team

Committing to the YouTube Data API v3

Since the YouTube Data API v3 launch in 2012, many of you have used the v3 API to create integrations like Next Big Sound and Interesante.

The YouTube Data API v3 is now on the list of APIs identified in our deprecation policy, which means we will notify developers a year in advance before deprecating v3. Note, however, that some specific v3 features are excluded from this notice requirement. You can find the list here. As a reminder, v3 gives you the ability to get information about Freebase topics associated with the videos, more search features, improved client libraries support and much more.

To focus on improving v3, it’s time to say goodbye to our old friend, v2. In keeping with deprecation policy, most API functionality will remain available for use until April 20, 2015, so you have more than a year to move to the new API. See the deprecation policy in the Terms of Service for more details.

While v3 offers the majority of v2 functionality, there are currently a couple of tasks that can only be done with the older API. Specifically, applications that manage captions or that work with video comments still need to use the v2 API until modern equivalents are available. Our goal is to provide similar functionality well before the April 2015 shut-off date—please subscribe to this blog, the YouTube Data API v3 revision history page, or follow +YouTubeDev on Google+ to keep up-to-date.

If you’re a v2 developer who’s looking for help migrating to v3, the best place to start is with our documentation and FAQs. We've also made several videos that explain v3 concepts, such as registering for API access and handling authorization with OAuth 2.0.

Cheers,

—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Building on YouTube APIs in the cloud with Google Apps Script

There’s nothing better in this world than a great pairing, like coffee and donuts or bees and honey. Today there’s a new one to add to the list: Google Apps Script now has built in support for the YouTube Data v3 and YouTube Analytics APIs. If you haven’t yet heard of Google Apps Script, you’re missing out on an easy-to-use tool for integrating and automating common tasks across many of Google’s services. With less than half a screen’s worth of code in Google Apps Script’s cloud-based editor, you can:

• Dynamically update a spreadsheet containing watch-time statistics for all of your channel's videos, with all the flexibility and power of Google Sheets to sort and slice that data
• Create a live dashboard or scheduled email report about your channel's performance
• Handle channel management tasks such as scheduling automatic bulletins or changing the visibility of a large number of videos from private to public
• Automate playlist rotation without having to maintain a server or keep a computer for the sole purpose of running a script

Google Apps Script's cloud-based environment and autocomplete functionality make it easy to just open an editor, enable the YouTube APIs, and start writing code:

For functions that require OAuth 2.0 authorization, there’s no authorization code to write and no token management to deal with. Once your script is ready, just click “Run” and Google Apps Script will present you with an authorization dialog. Once you select the channel you want to authorize, the script will have all of the permissions it needs to operate on your behalf, running in the background at scheduled intervals if you so desire.

To get started, browse to Google Drive. Click “Create” and then choose “Script”. This will open a new browser tab to the Google Apps Script editor. Name your project and click on “Resources” and select “Advanced Google Services”:

Toggle the YouTube Data API and/or YouTube Analytics API on:

Note the message that these services must be enabled in the API console. Click the link to be taken to the Google Developer Console. The link in the message will take you to a specific API project created for this specific Apps Script. Scroll down and toggle on the YouTube APIs the script will use:

Switch back to the tab containing Google Apps Script and click “OK”. You’re ready to start writing code. Type “YouTube” and hit the period key (“.”). If the APIs have been turned on correctly, you will be able to start writing code and calling functions available in the Data API or Analytics API. For instance, a short script that searches for videos about “dogs” and prints the video IDs to the Google Apps Script log would look like this:

function searchByKeyword() {
  var results = YouTube.Search.list("id,snippet", 
                   {q : "google apps script", maxResults: 25});
  
  for(var i in results.items) {
    var item = results.items[i];
    Logger.log("[%s] Title: %s", item.id.videoId, item.snippet.title);
  }
}

For more information about this update to Google Apps Script, check out the post on their official blog. To learn more about how to integrate scheduled jobs, write to spreadsheets or any of the many things Google Apps Script can do, check out the tutorials at their home at developers.google.com/apps-script. If you’re the type that prefers to learn on the go, get started with your own copy of our sample code in your Google Drive. You will still need to enable the APIs, so don’t forget to go to “Resources > Advanced Google services” for the link to the Developer Console project to turn on the APIs.

If you have any questions, feel free to find us on StackOverflow under the youtube-api and google-apps-script tags. Happy coding!

- Ikai Lan
YouTube Developer Relations

3.. 2.. 1.. and you are LIVE!

Since the YouTube Live Streaming API is announced, we’ve seen great tools and apps that helped eligible channels to stream their content on YouTube. 

Now that the YouTube Live Streaming platform is open to all verified channels, your live streaming apps will have a wider audience than ever.

How to start integration with the YouTube Live API:

• Register your application with YouTube Data API v3

• Documentation
• The Getting Started guide explains basic concepts of YouTube Live Streaming and of the API itself.
• 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 show some great demos from our partners to help stimulate your creativity.

Stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

-Satyajeet Salgar, Tim James, Ibrahim Ulukaya and the YouTube Live Streaming Team

Let your users discover live events and track their audience

YouTube Live streaming platform enables eligible channels to stream live content on YouTube.  

With the addition of live streaming content to the Data API, you can make it easier for users to find information about these live streaming events:

• get search results indicating whether a video is an upcoming or active live broadcast
• get both scheduled and actual values of start and end time of the broadcast
• get concurrent viewer count of a broadcast
• search for live content via eventType filter

How to start implementing new features

• The basics
• The new snippet.liveBroadcastContent property in search results indicates whether a video or channel resource has live broadcast content. Valid property values are upcoming, active, and none.
• The video resource's new liveStreamingDetails property is an object that contains metadata about a live video broadcast. To retrieve this metadata, include liveStreamingDetails in the part parameter value's list of resource parts when calling the videos.list, videos.insert, or videos.update method. The metadata includes the following new properties: actualStartTime, actualEndTime, scheduledStartTime, scheduledEndTime, concurrentViewers.
• The search.list method's eventType parameter and the search result's snippet.liveBroadcastContent property.
  
  

• 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.

Stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

Keep it live,

-Derek Tan, Ibrahim Ulukaya and the YouTube Live Streaming Team