YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: sup

Engineering and Developers Blog

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Building Professional Video Sites with YouTube APIs

Thursday, December 29, 2011

VidCaster is a video content management system, whose goal is to make building a website with video as easy as possible.

VidCaster makes use of custom URLs, video sitemaps, metadata, and thumbnails to integrate well with search engines. They provide lots of features to customize your video site, like uploading a logo, picking a theme and choosing custom colors, and you can even upload custom CSS. Using their video management interface, you can publish, unpublish and delete videos. VidCaster can even distribute the videos from your video site to third-party sites such as YouTube and Twitter, and they can also integrate analytics from third-party sources.

VidCaster uses OAuth2 with the YouTube API to manage the user’s YouTube account, using both SUP (Simple Update Protocol) and polling to make sure a user’s video site is always in sync with their YouTube channel. Companies that use VidCaster include AirBnB, Hackers and Founders, and Dirtcast.

By integrating closely with YouTube’s data API, VidCaster makes it easy for users to take advantage of YouTube’s video service from within their own custom video site.

Moviecom.tv tries to make it easy for businesses to build video sites about their company.

Like VidCaster, Moviecom.tv provides users with a variety of features to customize their video site. They too show videos hosted on YouTube, but their integration with YouTube doesn’t yet include all the features that VidCaster does — for instance, Moviecom.tv can show YouTube videos using the iframe player, but they haven’t yet integrated with YouTube’s data API. This is something they plan on doing early in 2012. Moviecom.tv also touts their mobile application which takes the friction out of recording and uploading video to the right place.

And they’re doing well at it — they were recently named a Red Herring Global 100 Winner. Internet World, City Index, and Staples are all example sites created using their platform:

Companies like VidCaster and Moviecom.tv are a welcome part of the online video ecosystem. As Moviecom.tv CEO Gillian O'Neil once noted, Moviecom.tv isn’t competing with YouTube. By enabling third-party video sites to embed YouTube videos, YouTube isn’t trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. They’re making the pie bigger.

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team

Google

Labels: embedding , oauth , sup

PubSubHubbub for YouTube Activities

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Update (February 2012): We're happy to report that PubSubHubbub functionality for YouTube feeds has been restored for the uploads, subscriptions, and favorites feed. When subscribing to a feed URL, be sure that the only URL parameter you include is v=2, e.g. http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/GoogleDevelopers/uploads?v=2

Update (November 2011): As mentioned below, PubSubHubbub for YouTube feeds is currently inactive. The engineering team is investigating options for restoring functionality; more info will be posted following those investigations.

Update (October 2011): Unfortunately, we no longer support subscribing to YouTube user events via PubSubHubbub. We suggest using the Simple Update Protocol as an alternative.

PubSubHubbub, for those not in the know, is a server-to-server protocol for notifying interested parties of events they’re interested in. Notifications are pushed out to subscribers via HTTP web hooks, which offers efficiencies over polling-based solutions. With PubSubHubbub, your server finds out about events in near real-time, without having to determine the optimal polling interval or repeatedly fetch individual activity feeds that haven’t changed.

We’re happy to announce that it’s now possible to subscribe to three types of YouTube user events via PubSubHubbub: video uploads, new subscriptions, and video favorites. The subscription requests need to be made on a per-user basis, so you will only receive updates for specific users that you’re interested in.Your code can look for our PubSubHubbub hub address in the href attribute of the top-level <link rel='hub'> element in uploads, subscriptions, and favorites feeds. For example, the feed http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/GoogleDevelopers/uploads?v=2 exposes the hub address in the <link rel='hub' href='http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com'/> element.

More details on the PubSubHubbub can be found in the specification document. If you’d like your server to receive YouTube user event updates via PubSubHubbub, this list of libraries is a good place to start.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team, in conjunction with the PubSubHubbub Team