YouTube is the core pillars of Google’s strategy of pushing forward into a Web based future. It’s still the most popular video site online and it has the potential to drive features like HTML5 and mobile video to even greater heights. Continuing this theme, the YouTube API team has announced new features that are sure to delight developers.
To help improve the exploding traffic that mobile video is driving, Google will be releasing a YouTube Android Player API. It promises to deliver videos that are “high quality, fast and sleek.” Such a change would be much appreciated as YouTube videos don’t exactly deliver the quality that I’m used to on desktop when I go for mobile viewing on my Android. If somebody can build a YouTube app that’s similar to the excellent PlayStation Vita YouTube app, I’d be all for it.
The team has made some improvements to YouTube Direct which allows users to directly submit videos to organizations or groups. The group can then compile these videos into a playlist to display on their Web site for all the world to see. That’s where the YouTube Direct Lite player comes in with a CORS-powered JavaScript application that allows groups to embed the videos on the site as an add-on.
The YouTube Analytics API is also getting some love in the form of custom tools. Developers can now create custom tools for displaying data. It’s a much more elegant option than the previous way of downloading an archive of CSV files and processing them yourself. The new tools are powered by a RESTful Web service that allows for requests of customized reports.
The YouTube team made it seem like there’s going to be more announcements coming today when Google’s next keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST). We’ll be watching to bring you the latest and greatest news from Google and hopefully some more YouTube goodies.