[MUSIC PLAYING]
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Hello, and welcome to
YouTube Developers Live.
We have an exciting show for you today.
Let me introduce our hosts and guests.
My name is Jarek Wilkiewicz.
In the studio, I have Jeremy Walker.
JEREMY WALKER: Hello.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: How are you doing, Jeremy?
JEREMY WALKER: Doing well.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: I heard you got a lot of sleep last night.
JEREMY WALKER: I did.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: You do seem very perky.
I think you can hardly sit in your chair.
JEREMY WALKER: I can't.
I'm too excited to the demo.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: All right, we'll have to restrain you
then for the rest of the show.
And then our distinguished guests, from Telly--
on my left, I have Evelio Tarazona.
How are we doing?
EVELIO TARAZONA: We're good.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Thank you very much for
visiting us this morning.
I was told that you guys hit pretty bad traffic on 101 here
in Silicon Valley coming down from San Francisco.
EVELIO TARAZONA: Ah, well, it wasn't that bad, but we are
here, [INAUDIBLE].
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Cool.
And then Adil Lalani, who's the co-founder and CTO.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: How are you doing, Adil?
ADIL LALANI: Great.
Happy to be here.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: All right.
So let's talk about Telly.
What we would like to learn is how did you
come up with the idea?
What is the problem you're trying to solve?
And then I understand you came with a cool
demo for us to see.
So we would like to see some demos later on as well.
ADIL LALANI: Sure.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: So tell us, how did you come up with the
idea of Telly?
ADIL LALANI: So the idea for Telly actually came out of
frustration that my co-founder and I were facing.
And I think this is a frustration that a lot of
people face.
It's that I'm bored, and I want to
watch some cool videos.
And finding--
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Like this one, for example.
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
Just finding cool videos to watch and for the right moment
is actually pretty difficult.
Unless you know exactly what to search for, there are just
too many videos out there.
You don't know which one to click on.
And that's the problem we're trying to solve.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Great.
And then, you guys working on Twitvid before on this, right?
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: So is Twitvid still going on?
What's the relationship between that and your
discovery app?
ADIL LALANI: Yeah, sure.
So Twitvid is still alive.
Our Twitvid apps are still strong on Android and iPhone.
And Telly is an expansion beyond Twitvid really trying
to solve the problem of video discovery.
Whereas Twitvid was more of how do I share a video easily
on Twitter, or even on Facebook?
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: So you seem to be very focused on video--
ADIL LALANI: Yes.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: --but a small pivot towards discovery
with Telly.
ADIL LALANI: Yeah--
trying to address a new use case.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: OK, great.
And then you said that the inspiration for the product
came out of boredom?
ADIL LALANI: Yeah, pretty much.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: We don't hear that very often.
[LAUGHTER]
ADIL LALANI: Ever since the beginning, my co-founder and I
have been really passionate about video and just being
able to share videos and also being able
to watch cool videos.
And this is something that we have been working on for
nearly three to four years now.
So we just love the video space.
And we think, now, this year is going to be the big year
for video, especially for mobile video because of LTE
and all these smartphones getting amazing cameras.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Great.
Right.
So without further ado, could you show us
a little demo about--
show us how the app works?
And I understand you have a web version as well as the
mobile version.
ADIL LALANI: Sure.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: I think you guys brought in some cool
screen shots of the mobile app so we can see the highlights.
So why don't we try to do that?
ADIL LALANI: Sure.
So as you can see, this is Telly.com.
And essentially, what we're trying to do over here is
trying to get rid of all the noise and really just focus in
on the video that you're watching.
And the videos that are shown to you are suggested or
recommended by your friends.
So over here, it tells me that my close friends, Apoorva and
Evan, are recommending this Boston crazy mode video.
So I can click here, watch it.
And it should be something that's fairly interesting and
something I should probably really like, because my
friends also like it.
Then if I'm tired of this video, I could just hit Next
and move to the next video.
In this case, this is a video that Telly has recommended for
me based on my viewing habits, based on what I like, based on
many signals.
This next video, again, is another video that close
friends liked as well.
So essentially, when you go to Telly, you are discovering
videos from your friends that are recommended.
And also, at the same time, you're discovering popular
videos as well.
So I can click Popular, and these are videos shared by the
Telly community.
These are hand picked--
today's funniest videos, pretty much.
And you just swift through.
JEREMY WALKER: I got sucked into this the other day--
I was telling you before the show got started.
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
What we noticed--
this is actually a newer version of the site.
And before, we used to have a feed style,
kind of like Facebook.
With this new UI, we noticed almost triple the amount of
time spent, immediately overnight.
So it shows that people are more engaged in this
experience.
Now, at the same time, this is where we used the YouTube API
in some interesting ways.
We have a really cool-- we have searching for videos.
So I really like Armin van Buuren--
trance DJ.
So I'll type in "Armin van Buuren" here.
And you can see that the auto complete is showing me the top
videos from Armin.
And so I can just narrow it down and say, OK, actually, I
want to listen to the top video here.
So I just click on it, and it'll start
playing that video.
The other videos in the search results are actually related
to the first video that I just clicked on.
So we pretty much got to the core of what people want to
do, which is just watch videos and
serendipitously discover them.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Great.
And then, you also have a mobile app, right?
ADIL LALANI: Yes.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Is that something that
has launched recently?
ADIL LALANI: Our Android app has been in the market now for
a few months.
And it's doing really well.
So I'll bring up the Android app.
And I'll let Evelio--
oops.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: That disconnected the cable?
ADIL LALANI: I disconnected a cable?
Oops.
JEREMY WALKER: These are going to be sweet.
Oh, it doesn't like it.
EVELIO TARAZONA: All right, you can me what
screen shot you got.
ADIL LALANI: The feed.
EVELIO TARAZONA: The feed.
All right.
And in the feed, we've been working hurriedly to aggregate
the best videos for you, like what matters to you, your
friends that watch or like certain videos.
Another, we take advantage of the YouTube library, the
player library.
I remember last year, it was hard trying to work with the
HTML5 player of YouTube.
ADIL LALANI: Yep.
EVELIO TARAZONA: So our CEO just emailed, I
think it was you--
ADIL LALANI: Mmhm.
EVELIO TARAZONA: --or someone in the YouTube developer
relationships.
And somehow, they come up with this player.
We were like, wow, this is great, because it was really,
really a pain in the ass to--
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Yes.
For those of you those of you watching who are not familiar
with it, we have recently launched the YouTube Android
Player API.
And this is something that we announced late December.
And actually, Telly was one of the Trusted Testers for the
API before we launched.
So we got a lot of good feedback from you guys and a
few bug reports that we managed to
fix before the launch.
[LAUGHTER]
EVELIO TARAZONA: Yeah.
So in your feed, you get all the rich content, whatever.
It's like the Twitvid videos.
You can also get Vimeo videos, yeah?
Well, mobile, we are working to support them.
And right now we use HTML5 player.
And hopefully, someday, also we are going to get all the
players native.
For Telly, we use our own player.
It's pretty much a regular video with some customization
on top of it.
If we go further in the screen shot demo, we--
ADIL LALANI: So now, it's suggested friends.
EVELIO TARAZONA: OK.
So Telly's a social video network, so we focus on you
being able to find your friends, not only your Twitter
or Facebook friends, but also to discover new people.
So we try to suggest the top users we have, also people
that you might be interested in following so you can get
richer content in your feed.
ADIL LALANI: Your profile.
EVELIO TARAZONA: Well, in your profile, you find mostly the
videos you have liked or uploaded to Telly now.
But also, you can find information
like the regular profile.
It's not much [INAUDIBLE].
ADIL LALANI: And creation.
EVELIO TARAZONA: Well, that's pretty cool.
We've been working really hard to match our iOS efforts in
the creation sides.
We're trying to bring the cool filters we have in iOS.
So far, we have managed to put really, really good filters.
It's looking great.
Hopefully soon, we can launch them on Android, hopefully
taking advantage of the new APIs in Jelly Bean for media.
So stay tuned for it.
Keep the app installed.
Keep checking for any updates.
We will bring new filters and [INAUDIBLE].
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: So the app will allow me to both consume
content as well as create content, right?
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
EVELIO TARAZONA: Yeah.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: So this is kind of the Twitvid legacy
continuing within Telly?
ADIL LALANI: But with more tools to create
better videos, actually.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: I see.
ADIL LALANI: And then, there's also music.
EVELIO TARAZONA: Yeah.
So one of the points of having good creation tools beyond
just taking the video, we want to focus also on having great,
great tools to edit your videos.
So background music was one of the cool things you can do
with the app.
You can add music to your videos.
And you can tune it up, whatever, if you want the
audio to be just the song.
Or you can also put in something in the middle so you
get whatever the noise or your voice is in the video, but
also the music--
mix it up for you.
We're looking forward to also creating better tools.
We have a full road map of awesome
tools for video editing.
Video editing is one of the--
it's a hard task, right?
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Yeah.
EVELIO TARAZONA: I found myself, many times, really,
really frustrated with editing tools.
So we are trying to offer you a mobile app, solutions, and
tools so you can easily create really,
really beautiful videos.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Yeah, we spend quite a few hours
editing these types of videos sometimes.
[LAUGHTER]
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Great.
I know Jeremy had a bunch of questions about how you guys
implemented the application.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah.
So I usually like to get into the technical section.
And I wanted to talk to you a little about--
well, actually, let's just get started.
How did you implement Telly with the YouTube APIs?
ADIL LALANI: Sure.
So for every video that's being shared in your social
graph, Telly is sucking it in.
So we are pulling in all the videos that your friends are
sharing, pretty much.
And when we pull in a video, we are making a call to
YouTube's API--
if it's a YouTube video--
to really get some metadata around the video, to
understand if it's playable on mobile or not, if it's
embeddable or not.
What are the tags behind the video so we can properly
understand it.
And that's important to us, because we want to serve you
the right video for the right situation.
So for example, if you're on your mobile phone, we'll serve
you only YouTube videos that are playable on mobile.
We'll hide all the ones that can't play on mobile.
Whereas if you're on your laptop, we'll show you only
the videos that are embeddable by YouTube.
So that's one area that we really used the YouTube API.
The second area is in the player itself--
our player integration, and especially with the Android
device, using the YouTube SDK.
JEREMY WALKER: OK.
What do you guys use on the back end, language-wise?
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
It's a combination of node.js and PHP.
JEREMY WALKER: Oh, OK.
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
JEREMY WALKER: Cool.
So it sounds like you're using the data API, the iFrame embed
player API, and then the Android player API.
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
JEREMY WALKER: Have you guys tried out the new version
three of the data API yet?
ADIL LALANI: Yeah.
We actually had a cool experience with it.
I can share a little story.
So we had about five million plus videos that we had to get
the latest metadata for.
And making five million calls to YouTube's
V3 API in one day--
well, basically, it yield rate limited us.
So what we ended up doing was we set up a cluster
of servers on EC2--
probably hundreds of servers.
And they were all making calls to YouTube's API just so that
we can get around the rate limit and get the information
in one day.
So we did a little bit of hacking to play around and
pull in some data.
JEREMY WALKER: OK, cool.
Is there anything that surprised you about working
with the APIs?
Do you guys--
EVELIO TARAZONA: Well, in the Android side, we had this
interesting issue in the early stages with the library.
We had seen some black rectangles around.
I think it was because we were using a surface view then.
We changed for new APIs, like surface texture view.
And we eliminated those black rectangles.
It was much fun, because if you're taking a screen shot,
otherwise you don't get anything.
You get just the regular screen shot.
But it's on the display, and so you now have
a clue about it.
And hopefully, you guys managed to
resolve these issues.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Yeah.
I think for the first release, we don't have that support.
This is something that is being considered precisely for
this type of case.
EVELIO TARAZONA: Yeah, because in our initial field, we were
trying to bring the inline playback you get in the web.
You can scroll, and you have the video playing on it.
But we run into some issues with the
2.x version of Android.
So with 4--
Ice Cream Sandwich and up is a better experience in this way.
We will try to bring it back.
Right now, we use, as I just see in the
screen shots, we use--
a view itself that is fixed.
So hopefully, someday, we can bring the cool experience,
with, hopefully, CoverFlow too--
with carousel on it.
So we are looking forward to that.
JEREMY WALKER: Cool.
Well, do you have anything on your wish list that you'd like
to have in the API?
ADIL LALANI: Yeah, actually, two big things on my wish
list, at least.
I'm sure they have some, too.
One is a YouTube player SDK for iPhone, just like you did
for Android.
And the second one is if YouTube could ping us when a
video has changed state, almost, because some videos
get taken down for copyright infringement.
Some videos, one day they're mobile friendly, the next day
they're not.
So we always have to find out by asking
YouTube API all the time.
If YouTube's API can just ping us, that would be, I think, a
cleaner solution.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Yeah, we were just talking about that
yesterday with Jeremy.
ADIL LALANI: OK.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Yeah, actually, obviously, both
issues come up.
I would say the fire hose type of approach is something that
we've been hearing about from developers
for quite some time.
Great.
All right.
So should we look into our moderator to see what
questions we got?
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah.
Sure.
So it looks like we have a couple.
So actually, this is about the Telly mobile app.
And they want to know if you can fling it to Google TV, if
that's coming anytime soon.
EVELIO TARAZONA: We are definitely looking forward to
working on Google TV.
We've seen there is a big place for us to offer, like
discover on your TV.
And especially, Google TV is a good opportunity to get into.
So far, not actually inconveniences
are preventing this.
But right now, we are moving first from
smartphones to tablets.
Once we have support for tablets, it's going to be much
easier to support Google TV.
But we definitely want to support Google TV, because
it's an amazing experience you get in YouTube.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: For those of you watching, actually, we
have recently launched the YouTube Android player API on
Google TV, as well.
So in December, we had the mobile experience.
And then just a couple of weeks ago, we launched Google
TV support.
So if you're building a Google TV application, let us know,
because we're looking for a couple of them to feature.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah, definitely.
And then, of course, is YouTube
developer relations hiring?
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Is that question addressed to me?
JEREMY WALKER: It is.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: I think so.
So yes, we are hiring.
In fact, if you would like to learn more, go to
developers.google.com/jobs.
And you'll see our job descriptions on the positions
that are open.
And the larger Google Developer Relations team is
also hiring.
JEREMY WALKER: Great.
Well, that's all we have.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time and driving down
here from the beautiful city of San Francisco.
It was really fun hosting you.
And thank you for giving us all the great
feedback about the APIs.
ADIL LALANI: Great.
Thank you.
EVELIO TARAZONA: Thank you very much for having us.
JAREK WILKIEWICZ: Thank you.
And for those of you watching, we'll see you again next week,
Wednesday, 10:00 AM, Pacific.
Bye.