Last week saw Google announce two new elements in its YouTube
arsenal: the all singing, all dancing, all new API, and the fact that
YouTube will be coming to a Tivo near you very soon.
Personally, I’m much 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.
Why Not Just Buy An AppleTV
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.
YouTube Everywhere Is Where Its At
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.
A Smart Move By Google
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 in 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).
Conclusions
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
good service for the users of the new API and for Google‘s bottom line.
This article is based on a Profy post written by Leslie Poston.
