You Tube News: API Feature Release, Tivo Plans

Everyone is talking about You Tube releasing new features to its API and also about YouTube coming to a Tivo near you. Somehow I'm more excited about the API release. YouTube videos aren't that great to watch on my computer screen. In fact they get worse when you try and make them larger. Why would I want to torture myself by viewing them on my huge DLP TV monitor? No, the API is where the buzz is right now.

Think about it, if you want to share home movies and movies from the web with your family and friends on your television, why not just buy an AppleTV. Or, even better, hook a hard drive up to your television and feed it movies from your laptop. Why depend on Tivo and YouTube for your online movie experience? Even better, use the API to create your own module, and perhaps include a feature that cleans the video up a bit to avoid torturing the eyes of the viewer.

The big deal about YouTube's API is not that it is there - it has always been open to the public for use. No one has done much with it so far beyond creating a few blog plug ins and small programs like that because it was a static service. No, the big news about the API is that they have added something to it that they are calling YouTube Everywhere.

YouTube Everywhere basically transforms YouTube from a static destination to a service provider. By adding to the API to enable people to get to YouTube from anywhere, they are now offering a service instead of just passively drawing eyeballs to videos. YouTube Everywhere will let you interact with YouTube from nearly anywhere you can imagine.

Why is this a big deal? Being able to access the service anywhere means that they had to open the API up to accept players that aren't dependent on YouTube's embedded player, and that don't even have the YouTube label on them, among other things.

This is a smart move by Google. Google depends largely on ad revenue for their success. With the advent of ad blockers in browsers as internet users continue to resist flashing banners and annoying animated ads having an unintended effect on Google's less annoying AdSense text ads as well, they need to branch out. What better way to do that than to first embed ads inn YouTube videos (check), get the general YouTube user base used to seeing the ads (check) then expand them globally by opening the API to outside applications (check).

This is good news for bloggers and other people online who make their living with ad revenue. By climbing on this bandwagon, the ad revenue model can exist for a little while longer online, but it won't last forever. At some point even the video ads will be blocked by ad blocker programs. For now, thought, it is a genius idea that offers a goo service for the users of the new API and for Google's bottom line.

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