YouTube Direct

YouTube Direct, our open source platform for obtaining and moderating user-generated videos (and photos!), was first announced over two years ago. Since that time, the project has continued to grow, and we’re happy to announce the latest round of additional features. Most notably, we’ve released a completely rewritten YouTube Direct upload client for iOS devices (seen below). You can find it in its own open source project, and it complements the existing upload client for Android devices. As with the Android client, we see the iOS code as a reference implementation and a starting point for developers who want to build their own branded applications that submit video or photos that could be moderated using YouTube Direct.

The biggest change in the 3.0 release of the YouTube Direct server code has to do with multitenancy. As explained in this guide, YouTube Direct administrators can now deploy their code to App Engine once, and have App Engine serve many different logical instances of YouTube Direct, each with their own submission queues and moderators. While not every YouTube Direct deployment will benefit from this new functionality, we see it being particularly useful for agencies and other organizations that might have multiple individual clients, each interested in keeping track of their own YouTube Direct submissions. YouTube Direct powers a wide variety of video submission initiatives: sites as diverse as the New York Times’ Reflections on 9/11 project, DrugFree.org’s “You are not alone” and Google Developers’ own “Share your story” page are running by YouTube Direct behind the scenes.