YouTube expands, wants to be… Everywhere
Seems like YouTube is pretty much everywhere as it is — not that we’re complaining, Shiny Media sites use it a fair bit. However, that’s not enough for the Google-owned video site.
YouTube want to be even more open and accessible, making it easier for users to integrate both the video and community elements into other web sites. Imagine, now you can publish both the lousy video and the offensive comments on your very own site!
Hmm.
In the past, it was possible to watch YouTube videos from any site that chose to embed them, but if you wanted to shower praise or hurl insults, you had to visit YouTube. Now, they want to be more of a service rather than a destination site.
They’ve also released code which will allow other developers to customise how YouTube behaves on their site. The likes of Electronic Arts, the University of California, Animoto, and Tivo are already using the system.
Instead of the bog standard video controls, developers will be able to modify them with their own graphics. It also means that they can pull in just the types of video that they want to display — videos about dogs on skateboards, for example, if anyone still enjoys watching those.
So, according to YouTube:
The number of possible new applications is endless. Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical 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. Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.
For budding developers, the kit is available via Google Code.
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