YouTube offers new services for third parties — a big win for YouTube?

Venture Beat — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:27:40 -0700

YouTube is making itself a sort of platform for video creators and web site publishers who want to use its services to publish on other sites. The significance is that it wants to be the infrastructure of all online video, presumably so it can eventually run its own ads on any video, anywhere.

The changes today allow third parties to do many of the functions they would otherwise have to do on YouTube, but now from their own sites. An external site can upload videos and video responses to YouTube from within its own user interface, including new options for setting up options like pause, play and stop. It can add or edit user and video metadata, like titles, comments, ratings, descriptions, etc.

YouTube is also trying to address international audiences that want to see non-English videos via YouTube. Standard RSS feeds of the most viewed videos, the top rated videos, etc., as well as custom YouTube video search queries, will now be available for 18 international locations.

The Google-owned company uses the usual Google line about everything being free and available to anyone. As the company said in its announcement today. “We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos….”

But every video created by a third party, that uses YouTube’s APIs, will also appear in YouTube. Yes, this can bring more traffic to the third party. And certainly, the move makes sense for the many partners that YouTube has lined up for this launch. Electronic Arts, for example, will let users create videos out of its new game, Spore, using the YouTube service.

But it also means that video viewers can just go to YouTube instead of to the third party’s site. This is something star video creators like gossip blogger Perez Hilton have already rejected (our coverage), because while YouTube can still make money by selling ads on it site alongside videos, third party sites themselves may just get less traffic — so less money.

And what’s not announced today: Will YouTube let third parties run their own video advertising in their videos? YouTube has begun experimenting with its own overlays and other forms of video advertising — and certainly, it and every other online video provider is still figuring out how to monetize. But in fact the reason sites like Hulu exist is because the best video creators and publishers don’t want YouTube getting the traffic and the advertising dollars from their hard work.

Which leaves me wondering: Is today’s announcement an act of munificence? Or is it a shrewd business move to wipe out an entire range of competing video distribution and advertising service providers — Brightcove, Maven Networks (which just got bought by Yahoo), Broadband Enterprises (our coverage), and many, many more. In my view, as long as these companies continue to offer better ways for creators and publishers to make money, YouTube’s move is unlikely to be a threat.

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YouTube offers new services for third parties — a big win for YouTube?