So YouTube just added some new features to their API:
- Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
- Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
- Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
- Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
- Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software
How does this apply to Embedded Media Field? And how about to Drupal as a whole?
Embedded Media Field still needs to tie into the Media Mover module, firstly, to even allow uploading (harvesting) videos and sending them to YouTube (processing) before storing them in the content field. Once it does that, though, we can get a little smarter. Perhaps allowing users to post responses through the API, which would become YouTube videos showing up in response to a video there, and automatically also becoming a response to the Drupal content.
We can also tap into the custom queries when selecting video to embed.
Finally, we should be able to have more control over the UI, and could use jQuery to control the playback of the video, perhaps autoplaying a few seconds after the page load, or maybe jumping forward to our favorite part of the video. We’ll have to see about that.
What does that mean for the Internet? As pointed out by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, Google’s just flexing their muscles a bit more, trying to ensure the bulk of video on the Internet goes through GooTube. At least Embedded Media Field is taking a more open approach, independently supporting many other providers, such as Blip.TV, Revver, and Brightcove.
Aaron