YouTube: Broadcast Yourself, Anywhere

Rumors flew yesterday about today's YouTube announcement. Some thought it would be high-definition videos (long desired); others thought it would be a deal with Hulu (which would have been cool). The real announcement was an opening up of YouTube, turning it into a service that could power your own application, site, whatever, via new APIs.

No longer, for example, will you have to embed YouTube's own player and its branding; you'll even be able to upload videos and more.

According to the blog post announcement, these are the new APIs, which "build upon our existing APIs for querying the YouTube library and playing embedded YouTube videos":

• 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

Google also posted a series of "case studies" indicating how partners have already begun using these APIs. Examples include:

• Electronic Arts enables players to capture videos of user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly into YouTube.
  

• The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube.
  

• Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube.

More at the above link. And it also means you can expect announcements from these partners and others in the near future.

Now, about those high-def videos ...