Google Account support and YouTube API v2.1

Authenticated access to YouTube APIs lets your app offer many features that are unavailable to logged-out users. By authenticating user actions, your app can allow users to manage subscriptions, create playlists, and upload videos. Until recently, users could only perform any of these operations if they had YouTube accounts. (A YouTube account provides a user with a YouTube channel.)

We are pleased to announce that we have also started to give Google Account holders who don’t already have YouTube channels access to certain YouTube features on YouTube.com and in the YouTube API. We call these unlinked Google Accounts since they haven’t already been linked to a YouTube channel. For example, a user with a Gmail account or an Android device is certain to have a Google Account but may not have already linked that account to a YouTube channel.

What this means for your application is that with a few relatively simple changes, you should be able to allow authenticated access for users who have unlinked Google Accounts. Thus, those users will be able to log in to YouTube without having to create a YouTube username.

In a moment, we’ll dive into the details of how to use the API with unlinked Google Accounts and also offer a few user experience recommendations for your YouTube API application. First, though, a quick note about the new minor YouTube API revision that we’re introducing.