YouTube today announced new features that turn YouTube into a platform for Internet video development:

We now provide a complete set of (CRUD) capabilities for uploading, managing, searching, and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube “cloud,” managed by us. We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos, and we provide open access to our sizable global audience, enabling you to generate traffic for your site, visibility for your brand, or support for your cause. Meanwhile, we provide full access to our substantial video library, enabling you to attract users and enhance the experience on your site. It’s all free, and it’s available to everyone, starting now.

This is implemented through a set of new APIs that let developers:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

The move is a smart one for YouTube, because it turns the site from a destination into a platform. YouTube provided some examples of what this makes possible:

• Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly into YouTube.
• The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube.
• Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube.
• Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.

YouTube provides several resources to help you get started with the new video API’s:

• YouTube API case studies
• YouTube API examples at Google Code