YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: January 2012

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

Watch History Comes to the API

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

There’s a new entry in the growing list of video feeds supported by the YouTube Data API: the watch history feed. This feed allows authenticated API users to retrieve their own YouTube viewing histories—retrieving the watch history of any other user is not allowed. The information in this new feed corresponds to the viewing history exposed on the YouTube website.

The feed could enable interesting new functionality in your applications. If your site displays a list of recommended videos for an authenticated user to watch, you might consider excluding those videos that have been already viewed, for instance. Or you might want to include a video that you discover the user has been watching over and over again. Knowing the sorts of videos that a user watches makes it easier for your application to algorithmically suggest other videos that might interest your users.

As with any functionality related to the YouTube API, the best place to ask questions about the new watch history feed is the YouTube API developer forum.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team