Tag Archives: youtube api

YouTube releases scripts to help partners and creators to optimize their work

At YouTube Technology Services, we believe that open source software is essential for driving innovation and collaboration in the YouTube ecosystem. We want to make automation on YouTube more accessible by providing publicly available scripts to automate common use cases, aiming to decrease the cost for partners and creators to handle the most common scenarios when managing their content on YouTube.

In order to do so, we are announcing a new GitHub Organization, YouTubeLabs, where you will find open source code examples in the code-samples repository. We are providing open source scripts for a variety of use cases, including but not limited to:

Most code samples rely on public YouTube APIs or Google APIs and are well-documented and well-commented, in order to be easily modified by partners and creators.

We are delivering code that aims to be as accessible as possible to our partners and creators, with minimal configurations and minimal installation required. That's why we rely on Colaboratory Notebooks (Colab) and AppsScript as the main pillars of our open source offering. Colab is a free, cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment that makes it easy to run Python code in the browser, and it is integrated with Google Drive. AppsScript is a serverless platform that allows you to write scripts that run on Google's servers.

We believe that open source software is key to the future of the YouTube ecosystem. By making our code available to the public, we are helping to empower partners and creators to do more with YouTube.

Want to get started? Check out some of the code examples already available in YouTubeLabs’ code-sharing repository:

We look forward to continuing to build out our open source examples in the coming months, so don’t forget to “like and subscribe” to our repository to stay tuned for more!

By Federico Villa and Haley Schafer – Partner Technology Managers on behalf of YouTube Technology Services

An updated Terms of Service and New Developer Policies for the YouTube API Services

Today we are announcing changes to the YouTube API Services Terms of Service and introducing new Developer Policies to guide their implementation. These updated Terms of Service and new Developer Policies will take effect in six months so that you have time to understand and implement them.

The YouTube API Services Terms of Service are developers’ rules of the road, and like any rules of the road, they need to be updated over time as usage evolves. As we've grown, so has an entire ecosystem of companies that support users, creators and advertisers, many of them built on top of YouTube’s API Services. We haven’t had major updates to our API Services Terms of Service in over four years, so during the past several months we've been speaking to developers and studying how our API Services are being used to make sure that our terms make sense for the YouTube of today. We updated the YouTube API Services Terms of Service to keep up with usage growth, strengthen user controls and protections even further, and address misuse. You can find the updated terms here.

In order to provide more guidance to developers, which has been a key ask, we are introducing new Developer Policies. They aim to provide operational guidelines for accessing and using our API Services, covering user privacy and data protection, data storage, interface changes, uploads, comments, and more. You can read the full Developer Policies here.

In addition to the new terms, we're also announcing the upcoming YouTube’s Measurement Program. This new certification program will help participants provide accurate, consistent, and relevant YouTube measurement data to their clients and users, thereby helping them make informed decisions about YouTube. We’ll launch the program with a few initial partners before scaling it more broadly. Please visit the YouTube’s Measurement Program website to learn more.

We developed these updates with a few core principles in mind:
  • Improving the YouTube experience for users and creators. Every month, we update our app and site with dozens of new features for users and creators. We want to make sure that every application or website takes advantage of the latest and greatest YouTube functionalities. That’s why we’re introducing a Requirement of Minimum Functionality, which is designed to ensure users have a set of basic functionality around core parts of their YouTube experience, like video playback, comment management, video upload, and other services.
  • Strengthening user data and privacy. We want to help foster innovative products while giving users even more control around data privacy and security. These updated terms serve to strengthen our existing user controls and protections even further. For example, we now require developers to have a privacy policy that clearly explains to users what user info is accessed, collected and stored.
  • Fostering a healthy YouTube ecosystem. While we want to continue to encourage growth of our ecosystem, we also need to make sure our terms limit misuse. As the YouTube developer ecosystem evolved, we saw some fantastic uses of our API Services. Sadly, with amazing uses, there have also been a handful of applications that have misused our API Services. These updated terms serve to further protect against misuse and protect users, creators, and advertisers.
It's been great to see all the ways developer websites and applications have integrated with YouTube. We are committed to the YouTube API Services and we continue to invest with new features that will improve the product, such as expanding the Reporting API service with Payment reports, and Custom reports, launching later this year.

While we understand these updated terms and new policies may require some adjustment by developers, we believe they’ll help ensure our ecosystem remains strong and poised for growth. Again, to ensure developers have sufficient time to understand and adapt to these changes, the updated YouTube API Services Terms of Service and the new Developer Policies will take effect six months from now, on February 10, 2017. Please do take the time to read and become familiar with them. If you have any questions please get in touch with us via [email protected].

Posted by Shalini GovilPai, Global Head of Technology Solutions

Building on YouTube APIs in the cloud with Google Apps Script

There’s nothing better in this world than a great pairing, like coffee and donuts or bees and honey. Today there’s a new one to add to the list: Google Apps Script now has built in support for the YouTube Data v3 and YouTube Analytics APIs. If you haven’t yet heard of Google Apps Script, you’re missing out on an easy-to-use tool for integrating and automating common tasks across many of Google’s services. With less than half a screen’s worth of code in Google Apps Script’s cloud-based editor, you can:

  • Dynamically update a spreadsheet containing watch-time statistics for all of your channel's videos, with all the flexibility and power of Google Sheets to sort and slice that data
  • Create a live dashboard or scheduled email report about your channel's performance
  • Handle channel management tasks such as scheduling automatic bulletins or changing the visibility of a large number of videos from private to public
  • Automate playlist rotation without having to maintain a server or keep a computer for the sole purpose of running a script
Google Apps Script's cloud-based environment and autocomplete functionality make it easy to just open an editor, enable the YouTube APIs, and start writing code:



For functions that require OAuth 2.0 authorization, there’s no authorization code to write and no token management to deal with. Once your script is ready, just click “Run” and Google Apps Script will present you with an authorization dialog. Once you select the channel you want to authorize, the script will have all of the permissions it needs to operate on your behalf, running in the background at scheduled intervals if you so desire.

To get started, browse to Google Drive. Click “Create” and then choose “Script”. This will open a new browser tab to the Google Apps Script editor. Name your project and click on “Resources” and select “Advanced Google Services”:


Toggle the YouTube Data API and/or YouTube Analytics API on:


Note the message that these services must be enabled in the API console. Click the link to be taken to the Google Developer Console. The link in the message will take you to a specific API project created for this specific Apps Script. Scroll down and toggle on the YouTube APIs the script will use:


Switch back to the tab containing Google Apps Script and click “OK”. You’re ready to start writing code. Type “YouTube” and hit the period key (“.”). If the APIs have been turned on correctly, you will be able to start writing code and calling functions available in the Data API or Analytics API. For instance, a short script that searches for videos about “dogs” and prints the video IDs to the Google Apps Script log would look like this:

 
function searchByKeyword() {
  var results = YouTube.Search.list("id,snippet", 
                   {q : "google apps script", maxResults: 25});
  
  for(var i in results.items) {
    var item = results.items[i];
    Logger.log("[%s] Title: %s", item.id.videoId, item.snippet.title);
  }
}

For more information about this update to Google Apps Script, check out the post on their official blog. To learn more about how to integrate scheduled jobs, write to spreadsheets or any of the many things Google Apps Script can do, check out the tutorials at their home at developers.google.com/apps-script. If you’re the type that prefers to learn on the go, get started with your own copy of our sample code in your Google Drive. You will still need to enable the APIs, so don’t forget to go to “Resources > Advanced Google services” for the link to the Developer Console project to turn on the APIs.
If you have any questions, feel free to find us on StackOverflow under the youtube-api and google-apps-script tags. Happy coding!
- Ikai Lan
YouTube Developer Relations