At YouTube Technology Services, we believe that open source software is essential for driving innovation and collaboration in the YouTube ecosystem. We want to make automation on YouTube more accessible by providing publicly available scripts to automate common use cases, aiming to decrease the cost for partners and creators to handle the most common scenarios when managing their content on YouTube.

In order to do so, we are announcing a new GitHub Organization, YouTubeLabs, where you will find open source code examples in the code-samples repository. We are providing open source scripts for a variety of use cases, including but not limited to:

• Bulk video editing
• Analyzing your YouTube Analytics data
• Downloading and analyzing your YouTube Studio Content Manager Reports
• Content democratization and internationalization

Most code samples rely on public YouTube APIs or Google APIs and are well-documented and well-commented, in order to be easily modified by partners and creators.

We are delivering code that aims to be as accessible as possible to our partners and creators, with minimal configurations and minimal installation required. That's why we rely on Colaboratory Notebooks (Colab) and AppsScript as the main pillars of our open source offering. Colab is a free, cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment that makes it easy to run Python code in the browser, and it is integrated with Google Drive. AppsScript is a serverless platform that allows you to write scripts that run on Google's servers.

We believe that open source software is key to the future of the YouTube ecosystem. By making our code available to the public, we are helping to empower partners and creators to do more with YouTube.

Want to get started? Check out some of the code examples already available in YouTubeLabs’ code-sharing repository:

• Tutorial on how to use Colab – this is a great place to start if you’re new to using Colab!
• Create Shorts from a longform video – create a few shorts for your audience from your popular longform videos (local video file required).
• Download your available Studio Content Manager reports using the Reporting API – instead of manually downloading your reports from the Studio Content Manager, consider downloading them from the Reporting API to your Google Drive using this code sample.
• Translate captions and synthesize - create automated caption translations as well as automated synthetisation (Text to-speech generation) for a given video.

We look forward to continuing to build out our open source examples in the coming months, so don’t forget to “like and subscribe” to our repository to stay tuned for more!

By Federico Villa and Haley Schafer – Partner Technology Managers on behalf of YouTube Technology Services