Streaming Meta and Activity Data From YouTube

Continuing our showcasing of APIs from the Streamdata.io API Gallery that we have identified as good candidates for turning into data streams, we wanted to focus some attention on YouTube. No, it’s not what you think, we aren’t streaming video, we are talking about streaming metadata that surrounds videos that are published to the video-sharing platform. After profiling YouTube and adding to the API Gallery, we benchmarked the APIs and identified a handful that would make for opportunities to turn into real-time data streams when associated with the right accounts. To help get you started, we wanted to share the basic profile of the platform, along with those potential API paths.

YouTube
YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.

Links:

– Developers
– Blog
– Blog RSS
– Getting Started
– Github
– Twitter

API Paths:
– Get Activities (GET) – Returns a list of channel activity events that match the request criteria
– Get Channels (GET) – Returns a collection of zero or more channel resources that match the request criteria
– Get Comments (GET) – Returns a list of comments that match the API request parameters
– Get Live Broadcasts (GET) – Returns a list of YouTube broadcasts that match the API request parameters
– Get Live Chat Messages (GET) – Lists live chat messages for a specific chat
– Get Livestreams (GET) – Returns a list of video streams that match the API request parameters
– Get Subscriptions (GET) – Returns subscription resources that match the API request criteria
– Get Jobs (GET) – Lists jobs

It can be tough to talk about the streaming opportunities around video because people immediately think you are talking about streaming of video, rather than the data that surrounds them. However, once you get past the associations’ many folks make between streaming and videos, people begin to see the potential of streaming the rich meta and activity data that exists around video platforms. Making YouTube activity streams a pretty compelling target for driving real-time dashboards, and training up of machine learning models for applying in other ways.