YouTube minds the developer gap

YouTube has released application programming interfaces allowing its content to be embedded into other websites, desktop applications, video games and mobile devices.

This development has been engineered to expand YouTube's presence by making it easier for external programmers and partners to query its library.

The application programming interfaces (APIs) are designed to upload both videos and video responses, provide access to user and video metadata — such as titles, descriptions and ratings — and fetch localised standard feeds for most-viewed or top-rated videos across 18 international locations.

The new capabilities will also allow developers to customise the player user interface used to view the content and provide familiar video-playback controls, such as pause, play and stop.

In his official blog, YouTube's Jim Patterson wrote on Tuesday: "We now provide a complete set of [create, read, update and delete] capabilities for uploading, managing, searching and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube 'cloud', managed by us. We do the transcoding, hosting, streaming and thumbnailing and we provide open access to our global audience."

The release of the APIs comes at a time when YouTube is trying to elevate the perception of its site from a video portal to what it describes as "a video-services platform", available to any third-party website or other application.