YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: direct

Engineering and Developers Blog

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Enrich your site with YouTube Direct

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Today we announced the launch of YouTube Direct, a new tool built on top of YouTube's public APIs that enables any developer to solicit video submissions on their website, powered by YouTube.

Users upload their videos directly on the developer's website, after which the developer can review the submissions and select the best ones to showcase. Since these videos live on YouTube, users are able to reach YouTube's large user base directly while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.

Although YouTube Direct was originally created with our news partners in mind, we believe that other developers and website owners can benefit from it as well. To put YouTube Direct in the hands of as many developers as possible, we open sourced the bulk of the code and designed it to run on Google App Engine - Google's scalable hosting platform. This enables developers to easily deploy their own instance of the tool and take advantage of App Engine's scalability and low cost. The videos themselves are served from the same infrastructure that powers YouTube.com.

Visit YouTube Direct for Developers page to read more about it or go directly to the project page to download the code. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on this new tool. Drop us a line in YouTube's Developer Forum.