YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: channels

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

YouTube for Developers on... YouTube!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

For almost a year, we’ve been recording weekly shows for YouTube API developers as part of the Google Developers Live series, hosted on the Google Developers YouTube channel. Now, if you want to get just YouTube API-related videos, check out the new YouTube for Developers channel.On our new channel, you’ll find an up to date playlist of all our YouTube Developers Live shows (which we’ve also embedded below), as well as other playlists with videos related to the API. We still recommend subscribing to Google Developers as well, especially if you plan to work with multiple Google APIs in your applications.Not surprisingly, we’re using the YouTube Data API v3 to maintain the YouTube Developers Live playlist, and also to post channel bulletins whenever any video related to YouTube is added to the Google Developers channel. If you’re interested in doing this type of automatic curation in your own channels, you can take a look at the open source Ruby script that does the work for us.

Cheers,

—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Google

YouTube Channels: Get with the Program!

Monday, September 24, 2012

It's never been easier to create compelling videos and build a social presence on YouTube. At this year's Google I/O, YouTube product managers and channel gurus Dror and A.J. presented tips and tricks for making great content centered around raising brand awareness, raising money, and obtaining feedback about your products and services.

Don't worry if you missed their talk, we recorded it! So, sit back, grab some popcorn, and get ready to learn how to showcase your brand in front of YouTube's 800 million unique visitors per month!

Click here to view the slides from the video above.

Not sold yet? Well, have a sneak peek at some of the great material they cover below, and remember Dror and A.J.’s number one recommendation: make content, not commercials!

Sneak Peek

Tips and Tricks

Hook the user in the first 15 seconds (or they'll leave)
Brand your channel!
Make the most of your budget

Review YouTube’s Trends for ideas
Camera shy? Consider animation. (It might actually be cheaper than video.)
Several successful channels focus on curating videos from their community
Enhance your videos without fancy software/hardware using the YouTube Editor or other integrated web editors

Many, many more...

What's your goal?

Raising awareness

Master your PR via video (include all your features and make bloggers’ lives easier)
Provide product/service demo videos to promote your company
Tell backstories about clients using your products/services

Raising money

Add video to your crowdfunding pitch to increase funds raised by 114% (source: Indiegogo)

Researching and supporting users

Record tutorials to promote and educate (see which features are the most popular using YouTube’s Analytics... you might be surprised)
Use Google Hangouts for scalable office hours and virtual focus groups
Figure out what features customers like/dislike via the world’s largest focus group

Resources to learn more

Creator Hub
Creator Playbook (what you wish you knew about YouTube)
Trends Dashboard
YouTube for Developers (that’s us)

Wow, you made it this far without watching the video? Did we tell you they fill the presentation with awesome videos that showcase their points (including Chuck Testa)? Nope!? Well, now you know, and you will definitely want to watch the whole thing!

-Jeremy Walker, YouTube API Team

Google

Labels: channels , googleio , io12 , video , youtube

More Channels to Feed On

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The YouTube API’s standard feeds are a great way to expose your users to the best of what YouTube has to offer. To compliment the existing standard video feeds, which contain lists of individual videos that meet certain criteria (the top rated videos in the United States for the current day, for instance), we’re happy to introduce a new set of standard channel feeds.
While standard video feeds contain lists of videos, standard channel feeds contain lists of channels, or user accounts. The two types of standard channel feeds are most_viewed and most_subscribed, and just like with video feeds you can narrow down your results even further with time, region, and category or user type parameters. For example, the URL for requesting the most viewed channels with videos related to music in Great Britain for the past week is http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/channelstandardfeeds/GB/most_viewed/-/Music?v=2&time=this_week. Each entry in a standard channel feed provides detailed information about a specific YouTube channel, including a element with info on how many comments, videos, and views that channel has received.

Once you have these lists of channels, a natural next step would be to allow your logged-in users to subscribe to a given channel or view a list of videos uploaded in that channel.

Standard channel feeds are only available in version 2 of the YouTube API, which will soon be the default version in the production environment. In the meantime, be sure to explicitly specify that you want to use version 2 when making your YouTube API requests.

Cheers,
Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team