Monthly Archives: February 2011

Game Developers Conference Presentation

I will be co-presenting with my YouTube and Activision colleagues at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Feb 28th at 4:15pm at the Moscone Center. Below is the title and abstract. If you’re coming to GDC and would like to learn how one gets cool gameplay videos, such as the one in this post, from game console onto YouTube, join us!

YouTube APIs and Call of Duty Black Ops: Game Video Integration Process and Benefits
Over 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. One of the fastest growing categories is game play videos, generating hundreds of millions video playbacks each month. Integration of YouTube APIs in your next project will both provide a fun place for your fans to showcase their best achievements as well as give you the platform to reach out to a large gaming community on the site. In this talk, we will discuss the process of integrating YouTube video API into Call of Duty Black Ops, the biggest game of 2010.  We will describe API features geared towards engaging with the users and building more complex apps around user-generated content. We will also describe monetization and advertising strategies designed to help you market the game on YouTube.com and profit from the integration.
Here is the link to the session on the official GDC schedule and agenda for other cool Google GDC events.

YouTube @ 500 Startups

Last week I had an opportunity to present with Shiva Rajaraman and Prerna Gupta at 500 Startups. Shiva gave a very interesting overview of how to develop content for YouTube and how it is different from traditional media. Prerna’s presentation drilled into marketing products on YouTube with plenty of colorful examples, including her own app – LaDiDa. It was amazing to hear that LaDiDa used the YouTube as an advertising platform exclusively and the company was able to reach profitability thanks to it. Sometimes a simple trick of adding an off-site link in video metadata, such as in this example :

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/exmwSxv7XJI?prettyprint=true&v=2


<media:description type='plain'>http://grasshopper.com - This is a Pantless Knights tribute to our ... />

is enough to drive significant traffic to your site.
I covered, you guessed it, the YouTube API. The session was live-streamed and the recording is available below.