YouTube API philosophy is to get YouTube everywhere, give flexibility, maintain some consistency of overall YouTube user experience and, respect developers and content creators.
Just showed a new “beta” video player that has screenshots scrolling along the bottom of featured videos.
Offer REST and XML-RPC API’s. XML-RPC returns REST’s XML response escaped as an XML-RPC data structure. Seems a bit hacky to me.
Standard feed responses include thumbnail images.
Working on a new set of API’s that conform to the GData API standards. They’re investigating open/upload/write functionality. New search calls, filtertering, etc.
They’re working on adding ability to show a specific frame number as opposed to whatever thumbnail they give you by default. No release date.
They’re working on adding more programs where users can create businesses around their content. Those who use an app to manage Google My Business listings know what I mean by good content and how to use it to the full.
Also working on allowing users to do seeking, etc. from the API (ie. start the video from a specific start point). No planned support for allowing JavaScript to control the player.
For the foreseeable future they do not plan on allowing access to the raw videos (e.g. usurp the embedded player).
Lots of plans for extensive statistics for YouTube video viewing (e.g. how much of a video was watched, who’s watching, etc.).
They are working on an upload API, which is currently focused on device manufacturers and not necessarily 100% open to all (what about GData?).
Search only allows searching meta data, but implicit data (e.g. voice recognition) isn’t searchable. It doesn’t sound like they’re working on it, but Google being Google you should expect this (didn’t they just launch face recognition for image search?).
Geo tagging and deep geo tagging is on their roadmap. They’re going to be adding steps to the upload process that should allow better information. Once there’s enough of that data they’ll be exposing it.
Doesn’t exactly sound like they’re working on editing, but that they’re interested in it.
Google Analytics? Haven’t done any work to allow such things, but the hope is that stats will be available from them and exposed publicly.
