Tsai: On behalf of the entire YouTube API team,
I just want to welcome you guys to "Powered by YouTube."
This is our first ever API developer event
here at the YouTube office.
Um, my name's Christine Tsai.
I'm part of the YouTube APIs team.
And, um, I'm your resident housekeeper for the day.
Um, we launched the APIs back in March,
and since then, you know,
we thought it would be really great that--
you know, the community is one of the biggest features
on YouTube.com that we think really makes YouTube special.
We thought "Hey, we could bring that same community
"to developers, and, you know,
"really get the word out about our APIs,
"educate developers on, you know, what exactly
"you can do with the APIs
in bringing YouTube to your users."
So, um, this event is kind of like our, you know,
first step in really spreading the word.
Um, before we get started with Hunter,
I wanted to give a quick shout-out
to our office hours staff.
Office hours is the area you saw in the lobby
with the signs.
Um, these are our friendly TAs.
They're all members of the developer ops
or engineering team.
I'm gonna let Stephanie Liu give you a very quick spiel
on what office hours is all about.
Liu: Hey, guys.
So if you look at the back of your badge,
you'll see we have a pretty packed agenda today.
But if at any point, you want to wander out,
or, uh, you know, get your hands
on some of the stuff that you're hearing about,
we'll be outside.
Um, we're all engineers that work with outside developers,
or some core engineers as well.
My name's Stephanie.
And we have Jochen, Geoff, Ryan, Jeff, Max,
and John will also be around.
And anybody you see in one of these shirts will probably--
you know, you can approach.
But we'll be the ones outside.
Um, but yeah, if you want to--
We have some one-sheeters, we have some, you know,
sample code to get you guys started.
You can ask us questions,
we can probably do some demos for you,
things like that.
So at any point,
come outside, we're pretty friendly.
Tsai: Great. Thanks, guys.
And with that, I will hand it off
to Hunter Walk.
Walk: Hey. That's right, clap!
[applause]
Um, so thanks, Christine.
Uh, so there's my way-too-big picture.
Let's get rid of that. There.
Um, so yeah, so as Christine noted,
this is the first developer day,
so, uh, appreciate it,
because what YouTube really is--
and I lead product management here--
What YouTube really is,
it's a platform for people.
And so I think what we've always believed
from day one is that, um,
it's not about trying to pick what content
is gonna be successful,
or trying to, uh-- trying to sway
the community move in a certain way.
It's just providing a platform
where people can upload, share, and create.
And extending that offsite, I think,
is really part of our-- part of our DNA.
And so what started with the embedded player,
you know, sort of the ability to kind of grab a YouTube video
and put it anywhere you want,
has now evolved into the APIs that you see in front of you.
And I hope for folks who aren't as familiar with the APIs,
that they have the chance today to learn a little bit more.
For folks that have been using them,
I'm sure you won't be shy about finding people
in gray T-shirts and telling them
exactly what you want to see from the next version.
Um, so I'm just going to spend a few minutes
talking a little bit about what YouTube has
to offer to you guys.
Uh, and then, a few tips and trends
that I've sort of seen in our API development.
Uh, and then we can get into sort of some of the meat
of the technical discussion.
So the first thing that I believe YouTube has
is of this incredible corpus, right?
So in fewer than three years,
it's the most diverse, the broadest,
the deepest collection of video that you've ever seen.
Um, in fact, we now get more than 13 hours
of new video every minute.
So that's an incredible amount.
It's about 20,000 hours a day.
Uh, I was doing sort of, like, back-of-the-napkin math,
trying to compare the productivity
of the YouTube user base to traditional media.
And so that's the equivalent of if Hollywood was releasing
57,000 new full-length films into theaters each week.
And, just like Hollywood,
some of those YouTube videos become quite popular,
others are more sort of your niche independent,
uh, and some are just plain weird,
and, uh, God only knows why they exist.
But we celebrate them-- We celebrate them all.
And what does that mean?
It means that no matter whether
you're creating an application that's focused
on a very specific idea,
or just trying to broadly appeal
to, um, you know, the internet community,
we have a corpus for you to program from.
So I was checking out--
We have over 200,000, uh, Madonna videos.
Uh, quite exciting.
In fact, when she released her new album, she, you know--
Some of these celebrities now are starting to film things
exclusively for YouTube to try to sort of reach out
and talk to the YouTube community.
And I guess she was on the set of her video
with Justin Timberlake.
And she was vacuuming, and sort of, like,
"Oh, hey, YouTube," you know, "you caught me off guard"
type of thing.
And, uh--and then she's like, you know,
"I want you guys to keep uploading videos,
you know, singing my song, and Madonna videos and stuff."
And we all kind of looked, and, like,
"She just didn't tell everybody to start, like, you know,
ripping and uploading Madonna videos, did we?"
Like, "Somebody let her record label know."
But it turns out that, um,
they were all really cool about that.
And I think what we're seeing is sort of an evolution
where folks are getting more and more comfortable
with, um, different ideas of relationships
between creators and fans.
And so that's really exciting for us,
and, um, allows us to continue sort of enabling--
bring people closer together.
So 200,000 Madonna videos,
in case you want to create, uh, a Madonna fan site.
But maybe you have a very particular interest,
such as the sport of, uh, wife carrying.
[laughter]
And if that's the case,
I'm not here to judge you, that's cool.
Uh, totally, do your thing.
Uh, apparently, there's a few hundred other people
who are really into that too.
And, uh, thus, uh, don't--
You know, don't worry about going out and trying
to commission, or find, or sort of scare up video
to create that-- to create that dream site
or that dream application.
Just start borrowing it from YouTube.
But what's interesting is there's some things as--
as niche and,
uh, interesting as wife carrying might be,
there's some things where-- I'm sad to say--
YouTube still doesn't have enough video for you guys.
Um, fingerstaches.
So if you don't know the fingerstache,
the story of the fingerstache
is there's literally this guy who got a tattoo,
uh, of a little moustache on his index finger,
so that, I guess, you know, right at the opportune moment
when he's talking to you, he can kind of go like this.
[laughter]
Um, and as compelling as that is,
for some reason, we only have six fingerstache videos.
Um, so either we have a bunch of fingerstache videos,
and they're just not properly labeled,
or that quite hasn't caught on in the YouTube community yet.
So I'm sure within, uh-- before the day is up,
somebody out there will have created,
uh, a fingerstache YouTube app.
And, uh, by the time I check this later today,
you know, maybe we'll have 60 or 600.
So besides an incredible corpus of video
for you guys to draw from,
um, we have a community.
We have a community that can--
um, you can both deliver content into,
but that you can also use
to make aware of what you're doing.
So YouTube's community, if it was a country,
would actually be the third largest country in the world.
Uh, we would probably have a very strange-looking flag.
But I think what's just incredible is, uh,
maybe even more so than any other internet property,
I think we have the chance to make the entire internet
into YouTube's user base.
Why?
I think exactly what we were talking about before.
Sort of the breadth of what goes on here,
but also the reach.
The fact that in order to encounter YouTube content,
you don't have to come to YouTube.com.
In fact, uh, each, uh--
Each month, videos are viewed on more than 10 million
websites, blogs, uh, social network profiles.
And that's in large part to a lot of the amazing work
that folks like yourself are doing.
How to take the YouTube experience
and bring it outside of YouTube.com.
A little bit later today,
uh, Brian Glick will talk a little bit
about how the YouTube.com experience is evolving.
Um, but I think what we've really seen
is that the YouTube experience evolves not just because
of what we do,
but because of what you guys do.
And I think one of the biggest changes
in the last few quarters,
as I look back and sort of think
about where we were last year
and where we're going,
is that experience is not just web-based anymore.
So I don't know how many folks in this room
are, uh, application developers,
or have been working with, um, various maybe, uh, hardware,
um, or other solutions.
But increasingly, the YouTube experience
is not limited to the PC.
So the general promise of YouTube
is that for the first time, the user is at the center
of their media experience.
And that media experience tends to be a blend
of mass media, right?
So music videos, other things that are generally popular.
Niche media, and personal media,
things that are just being shared by family and friends.
And so whether you're looking at, uh,
the mobile, uh, devices,
or, increasingly, the living room.
Um, whether it's capture,
or things like, uh, the Flip video camera,
or delivery streaming through set-top boxes,
increasingly, YouTube is out there.
And, uh, we really want to figure out
how to continue to help you guys
take advantage of that footprint.
Because especially what we're seeing from consumers,
is that sort of a "powered by YouTube."
A YouTube, you know, YouTube-enabled
is a real great driver for demand and adoption
of new devices.
It's a use case people understand.
"Oh," you know, "why do I need a new camera,
"or why do I need a new phone?
"Because I can upload easily to YouTube?
Sounds great."
So before I let you guys go,
and get into a little bit more of the technical discussion,
I want to talk a little bit about three API trends,
and, um, hopefully how you guys can take advantage of this,
uh, to create even more and more successful applications.
Uh, the first is redefining exactly what is video
and what can be uploaded to YouTube.
So a few years back, YouTube--
I think one of the reasons they succeeded
was easiest way to get a video file
off your hard drive and onto the web.
Um, but to some extent, sort of that basic feature,
the upload button, you know,
has sort of become a commodity, right?
You can find that a lot of places.
And so I think one of the reasons
that YouTube continues to succeed,
and why our, uh, content contribution
continues to grow from the community
is we're now focused on making it easier and easier
to get content--create content right from devices.
So what you see here is a screen shot
from, uh, the video game Spore,
uh, Electronic Arts is putting out.
Uh, you guys may be familiar with this.
Will Wright, the guy who did "The Sims,"
one of the best-selling games of all time,
has now taken it up another level,
and you can, uh, essentially create a creature,
uh, and inhabit a whole world.
So building buzz for the game,
they brought out the creature creator, right?
So this was sort of like a creature modeler.
You can play--and they're actually running
a really cool contest on YouTube
where you sort of make your creature dance.
And, uh-- and you can win.
So what they did was use our upload API
directly in the application itself.
So with one click, you start doing screen capture,
and can upload to YouTube
using your user name and password
without ever even leaving Spore,
or without ever having to come to YouTube.
So before as where you thought that the output
of, you know, a video file
would be something that came from a camera.
Now, more and more, you can think,
"Wow, anything people are doing that I can capture,
"and turn into a file, and upload
is something that people want to share."
And of course, this turned into a lot of creative, uh, things.
You may have heard about sporn,
um, which is, uh--
Let's just call them genetically enhanced,
uh, creatures.
Um, I won't go into it.
If you haven't heard it before and you're interested,
just search for it on YouTube and you'll see.
But, uh, if you have kids in the room, hide their eyes.
Um, the second trend, uh, anthropomorphic dogs.
No, it's actually more about how to make use
of YouTube's community to build your application,
to build your community.
So what we're seeing, of course,
is lots of people who want to put content into YouTube
directly from their application.
Uh, this is, uh, Dogbook.
Uh, a dog community, and, uh, has a Facebook application.
And you can upload there directly from Facebook.
But what we're seeing more and more,
are people making use of the presence on YouTube
to help drive awareness and traffic
back to their application.
And that's great,
we love that bidirectional aspect of it.
What are some ways you can do that?
Um, well, obviously, you can sort of
insert metadata and tag the source.
You can put a URL into, um, the metadata file.
You know, "created on www.url.com,"
and it allows the YouTube community,
as they find your videos,
to go and then experience your service
in the context of the way you're building it.
So I think that's gonna be some place
where folks who love to do sort of, you know, like,
A/B testing and other things...
we don't know all the answers yet.
You're probably gonna find out
what's the best way to make the YouTube community
aware of services outside of the YouTube.com world.
Um, but we definitely want to support that.
Uh, and the third are really, really innovative
and interesting, uh,
displays of the, uh, YouTube content.
So one things we know-- one thing we know
is that, um, there's no way that YouTube.com
can help users find all the content they're looking for
in all the ways they want to find it, right?
So for instance, I always joke
that I'd love to see a view of content
that sort of shows me what was, uh, you know--
sort of the time machine.
What was on, uh, TV when I was, you know, eight years old?
Or what were things that were filmed on this date?
Um, and, you know, we try to make all these things
come to life.
But with a corpus that's just so large,
a lot of these needs are going to be met
not on YouTube.com, but outside.
Uh, and so this is a cool application called "TimeTube,"
from a start-up, uh, Dipity,
which, uh, using the API,
plots for particular concepts,
uh, videos along a timeline,
as well as relative, um, priority and relevance ranking.
And so this is, uh, the history of "Chocolate Rain."
Uh, and, uh, all started with a dream,
and then, uh, became, uh-- became a phenomenon.
So, uh, in wrapping up,
basically, I think the storyline here is that
YouTube is built on openness.
Uh, we succeeded because we took a first step
when not a lot of people were thinking
about pushing content out across the web,
uh, with our embedded player.
And since that time, have tried to move quickly
to push more and more of that into the APIs.
Uh, I think one of the most interesting features
that we've done this year is the chromeless API,
that Jeff will do a little bit more of a talk on later today,
which basically says "Hey, here's just a video stream,
"build whatever application--
whatever player you want around this."
Um, but at the end of the day,
the magic isn't gonna come I think
just from the tool set we enable.
It's gonna come from what you guys do on top of it.
So, um, if anything,
I hope today is sort of a call to action to inspire you
not only from what you hear from us,
but from talking with one another.