YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: October 2013

Let your users discover live events and track their audience

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

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

Spice up your channel with the InVideo Programming API

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

If you’ve used InVideo Programming before, you know that it’s a powerful way to attract subscribers to your channel. By featuring a watermark or a hit video on all videos on your channel, you can showcase the best of what your channel has to offer. You can also add a link to your home on social networks with a custom message to drive two-way conversation with your viewers on multiple fronts.
“That’s awesome,” you might say. “I’m already using it via the YouTube.com website!” Well, great! But did you know these options are available via our v3 Data API? The API enables all kinds of interesting use cases. Some examples:

Update the message to tease your latest tweet. When users click on your link, they are taken to your Twitter page

Feature the most recent upload to any channel on YouTube

Run a channel about television? You can write a script to rotate the featured video depending on whether it is the afternoon or the evening, a weekday or a weekend! Or, rotate the featured video daily to drive more views, reshares and discussion of quality content that might not be as fresh

Build a widget on your website or mobile app that lets your subscribers vote for a video to be featured every week! The video doesn’t have to be a video from your channel - it can be any video on YouTube!

InVideo Programming options are set as part of the channels resource, passed as a parameter to youtube.channels.update() in the invideoPromotion field. For instance, to feature this recent “YouTube Developers Live” show featuring our team’s favorite moments, I would structure the invideoPromotion field in my API request’s payload body like this:
invideoPromotion": { "items": [ { "id": { "type": "video", "videoId": "lzaYch2mqlU" }, "timing": { "type": "offsetFromStart", "offsetMs": "0", "durationMs": "15000" } } ]}
Other options for the type field in the id object include website and recentUpload, which correspond to InVideo Programming featuring a link, or automatically updating InVideo Programming featuring the latest video in a channel. For more information, see the documentation describing the invideoPromotion object in the channels resource.

A video featuring a watermark (top right) and InVideo Programming (bottom left)
Chances are good, though, that you’re using one of our API client libraries, which will help translate these API requests and responses into programmatic objects that you can manipulate and pass around in your code.
InVideo Programming functionality is relatively new, so if you are using an API client for a language like Java or .NET, you will need to make sure your client libraries are up-to-date before you can take advantage of these new features. Our samples are sorted by programming language on our Github page.
You can also set a channel’s watermark using the Data API’s watermarks.set() method. Watermarks are images that appear in the upper right hand corner of your videos that will link viewers to your channel on web and in the YouTube mobile apps for Android and iOS. This is usefu
InVideo Programming lets you reinforce your channel’s brand and drive viewers to other videos or social channels. The API makes it easy for your team to integrate InVideo Programming into your tools and workflow to make them more dynamic and interesting. Integrating the API into your tools and workflow only help to make your InVideo Programming more dynamic.
Happy coding!- Ikai Lan, YouTube API team

Engineering and Developers Blog

Let your users discover live events and track their audience

Spice up your channel with the InVideo Programming API

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