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by jmillikin 4787 days ago
The public YouTube API documented at https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/ appears to have all the functionality required to implement a TOS-compliant client. In particular, it has support for fetching the HTML required to embed a video player that obeys uploader settings for advertisement and device restriction.

Microsoft's original request is for Google to create a new API which would allow querying of richer metadata about videos. It's not apparent why this new API is required to write a TOS-compliant YouTube client.

1 comments

Windows Phone has tens of millions of users and YT is a really popular app so it would hit the quota limit real quick and get banned.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started#quo...

(reposting an earlier comment)

To my knowledge the YouTube API doesn't ban users for excessive use of the API, it just throttles them temporarily.

The exact throttling values are not posted publicly, but there are multiple third-party apps using the YouTube APIs successfully, so I expect the limits are high enough for a standard client to work without problems.

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If Microsoft wrote a TOS-compliant YouTube app and put it in their app store, but it was written in a way that bumped up against the quota limits, I'm sure they and Google could work out some way to grant them more quota.

>If Microsoft wrote a TOS-compliant YouTube app and put it in their app store, but it was written in a way that bumped up against the quota limits, I'm sure they and Google could work out some way to grant them more quota.

MS has been requesting API access since three years, so I think there was no amicable resolution and MS was forced to do this.

From their statement:

"We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs," says a Microsoft spokesperson.

There is a difference between

1) Requesting Google design, implement, and publish a set of new APIs specifically to support a particular low-population platform owned by a self-vowed enemy of the technology stack Google is built on.

2) Requesting Google increment a few numbers in a database somewhere.