Youtube is one of the best video sharing platforms where everyone can upload and share their videos across the globe. As a blogger, Youtube helps me to share the video tutorials with you which I can also embed in the post page where tutorial is explained. I strongly believe the future of blogging is with videos hence Youtube. Recently, I came across a post where it says about the decline in the teen traffic to Facebook. To cut short, the post says that teens are spending most of their time on Youtube & Mobile texting apps like What’s App or WeChat. So, It is also very important for a blogger to connect with Youtube and begin with video platform to reach larger audience. It is needless to say how khanacademy.org became so popular with their own approach for delivering the content and the way they integrated lessons using Youtube. In this post today, I want to introduce you to the Youtube API and discuss the purpose and benefits of using Youtube API.
YOUTUBE API
For those who doesn’t know about API, API stands for Application Programming Interface using which a developer can program the way the application works. To elaborate it in our context, we can use this API’s to control the way Youtube works on our pages and customize it as per our specific requirements.
Here are some sample things that we can do using Youtube API
- Integrating Youtube functionalities into our own blog or application.
- Administering the content of our Youtube account directly from our application.
- Performing search operations on youtube and retrieving the related results.
- Controlling the play back of youtube videos using Player API.
The list can go as long as our creativity can go, It is up to us to decide how we want to use Youtube data.
Documentation of the Youtube API is the best resource for getting started with Youtube API and is very well organized for beginners like me.
API’s of Youtube are divided into multiple segments based on the nature of the requirement.
1) Youtube Data API
Youtube Data API let’s us incorporate the functionality of Youtube into our custom application which includes content creation, account management, video playback, searching youtube content, viewer statistics and many more. This API allows us to create full fledged custom application using youtube data.
2) Youtube Analytics API
This API let’s us to use all the statistical data about the viewer stats that youtube gathers. Using this we can create a dashboard with statistical details of how our videos are performing.
3) Youtube Live Streaming API
This API is relatively new API which let’s us control the live events which includes scheduling to broadcasting an event.
4) Youtube Player Tools
This API let’s you control the way the youtube player works. There are different type of players available hence different API’s for different players like
- Android API
- Iframe API
- Java Script API
- Flash API
Apart from these there are other options to use Youtube Subscribe buttons and Upload widgets to upload the videos.
This is the introduction to Youtube API. Please go through the API documentation for more information and in the future posts we will take a specific requirement and use Youtube API’s to get the job done.
