Today we announced the launch of YouTube Direct, a new tool built on top of YouTube's public APIs that enables any developer to solicit video submissions on their website, powered by YouTube.

Users upload their videos directly on the developer's website, after which the developer can review the submissions and select the best ones to showcase. Since these videos live on YouTube, users are able to reach YouTube's large user base directly while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.

Although YouTube Direct was originally created with our news partners in mind, we believe that other developers and website owners can benefit from it as well. To put YouTube Direct in the hands of as many developers as possible, we open sourced the bulk of the code and designed it to run on Google App Engine - Google's scalable hosting platform. This enables developers to easily deploy their own instance of the tool and take advantage of App Engine's scalability and low cost. The videos themselves are served from the same infrastructure that powers YouTube.com.

Visit YouTube Direct for Developers page to read more about it or go directly to the project page to download the code. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on this new tool. Drop us a line in YouTube's Developer Forum.

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Today we announced the launch of YouTube Direct, a new tool built on top of YouTube's public APIs that enables any developer to solicit video submissions on their website, powered by YouTube.

Users upload their videos directly on the developer's website, after which the developer can review the submissions and select the best ones to showcase. Since these videos live on YouTube, users are able to reach YouTube's large user base directly while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.

Although YouTube Direct was originally created with our news partners in mind, we believe that other developers and website owners can benefit from it as well. To put YouTube Direct in the hands of as many developers as possible, we open sourced the bulk of the code and designed it to run on Google App Engine - Google's scalable hosting platform. This enables developers to easily deploy their own instance of the tool and take advantage of App Engine's scalability and low cost. The videos themselves are served from the same infrastructure that powers YouTube.com.

Visit YouTube Direct for Developers page to read more about it or go directly to the project page to download the code. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on this new tool. Drop us a line in YouTube's Developer Forum.

While we don't normally call out new releases of the Google Data YouTube API on this blog, we wanted to draw specific attention to the version that has just been pushed out to our staging servers. There are two specific changes that we'd like to give our developers and partners a chance to test before they go live. Both changes affect important areas of the API: ClientLogin authentication, and playback URLs in media:content entries.

We fully intend for the changes to be backwards compatible, and from the developer's perspective you should not have to change any code. But testing your code is always a best practice, so if you rely on ClientLogin or retrieving media playback URLs from the Google Data YouTube API, please repoint your code to http://stage.gdata.youtube.com and confirm functionality.

Any incompatibilities should be reported as soon as possible in our YouTube API Developer Forum. We expect to move the changes from the staging environment into production on November 17.

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While we don't normally call out new releases of the Google Data YouTube API on this blog, we wanted to draw specific attention to the version that has just been pushed out to our staging servers. There are two specific changes that we'd like to give our developers and partners a chance to test before they go live. Both changes affect important areas of the API: ClientLogin authentication, and playback URLs in media:content entries.

We fully intend for the changes to be backwards compatible, and from the developer's perspective you should not have to change any code. But testing your code is always a best practice, so if you rely on ClientLogin or retrieving media playback URLs from the Google Data YouTube API, please repoint your code to http://stage.gdata.youtube.com and confirm functionality.

Any incompatibilities should be reported as soon as possible in our YouTube API Developer Forum. We expect to move the changes from the staging environment into production on November 17.

It's been several years since we've released the Google Data-based YouTube API, and in that time we've been encouraging developers who used the legacy YouTube API to upgrade before we pull the metaphoric plug on that older version. At this point, all but a handful of holdouts have upgraded, and as of November 11, 2009, the legacy YouTube API will cease operation.

If you're using one of our YouTube API client libraries, then you're definitely making use of the modern Google Data YouTube API. If you're manually making HTTP requests to a URL whose hostname contains gdata.youtube.com, then you're also good to go. If you think you might still be using the legacy YouTube API but aren't sure, take a look at some of the example legacy API calls in this migration guide. If it turns out that you are still using the older API, then the migration guide will give you the information you need to upgrade – and be sure to do so before November 11!

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It's been several years since we've released the Google Data-based YouTube API, and in that time we've been encouraging developers who used the legacy YouTube API to upgrade before we pull the metaphoric plug on that older version. At this point, all but a handful of holdouts have upgraded, and as of November 11, 2009, the legacy YouTube API will cease operation.

If you're using one of our YouTube API client libraries, then you're definitely making use of the modern Google Data YouTube API. If you're manually making HTTP requests to a URL whose hostname contains gdata.youtube.com, then you're also good to go. If you think you might still be using the legacy YouTube API but aren't sure, take a look at some of the example legacy API calls in this migration guide. If it turns out that you are still using the older API, then the migration guide will give you the information you need to upgrade – and be sure to do so before November 11!