Yesterday Youtube announced that it has broadened its APIs thus making it even easier for third parties to integrate YouTube content and community into other websites, desktop applications, video games, mobile devices, televisions, cameras, as well as a bunch of other applications… In essence, Youtube has become an open video services platform.

According to Jim Patterson (Product Manager at Youtube)  the new API services include :

- Upload videos and video responses to YouTube

- Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)

- Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales

- Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales

- Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software”  

Check out the video that Youtube has made in order to explain the new API changes:

This is an exciting step forward for online videos, however it will also have some brutal consequences. As Techcrunch (Erick Schonfeld) correctly points out, other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks and Move Networks will probably have a hard time keeping up with these changes.

Another question in everyone’s minds at the moment is how the ad revenue split will be defined. Here is what Jim Patterson had to say on the matter:

“We are not introducing any fundamentally new way to monetize. Any video that is uploaded through our API is treated exactly as on YouTube.com. In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.

It is not a white-label service. We do offer a hosting service, but it is not a direct alternative to the companies that you mention. There are some big differences. It is a YouTube-branded experience. It is free. The price you pay for using it is you must participate in the YouTube community. ”

Lets see what happens next! In the meantime take a look at these interesting case studies to see how various partners have integrated Youtube into their sites.