Rafe Needleman
Google's YouTube announced last night that it is expanding its API to allow more direct access to the service. The updates to the API allow developers deeper access into YouTube for video uploading, and allow "chromeless" players, or players without the traditional YouTube interface and branding associated with it.
This move means YouTube will become not just a destination for videos, but a system that serves videos into other apps. Clearly it's a play to make YouTube into an infrastructure that, once adopted by a developer on a site, would be difficult to remove from it. It also gives YouTube an even more impressive library of videos to serve up and to serve advertising against.
We've already seen a few apps that use YouTube without advertising it. The music streaming service Songza, for example, is essentially an interface into the audio portion of YouTube's database.
There's more information on the announcement on the YouTube blog.
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