3rd Party Flash player for YouTube

[SGBoise]

Hello,

I own autovideoscript.com which basically queries youtube and displays the contents.

One of my clients wants to use a different flash player with more features than the default flash player used by youtube api. After reading tos of youtube and google's youtube api I am pretty much confused.

Google's youtube api tos - http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/terms.html
Youtube tos - http://www.youtube.com/t/terms

Google's youtube api tos doesn't seam to be any restrictions on the way video is display. Youtube's tos states:

"C. You agree not to access User Submissions (defined below) or YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate."

and

"F. If you use the YouTube Embeddable Player on your website, you must include a prominent link back to the YouTube website on the pages containing the Embeddable Player and you may not modify, build upon, or block any portion of the Embeddable Player in any way."

Based on those two sections, it seams that you maybe not use a 3rd party flash player to display youtube videos. But this posting on the google's developer api blog states that you are allowed to access the youtube api directly from your own flash player.

http://apiblog.youtube.com/2008/02/important-info-that-could-affect-you.html

The tos and what they allow you to do seams to be conflicting.

I would appreciate if someone with legal expertise clarify this. Thanks in advanced.

 

[Ronald Regging]

The only way you are going to get an answer is by asking YouTube directly... What is anyone here going to be able to tell you other than, yes, they have conflicting statements? Most likely they've decided to allow it to be used in third party flash apps, as per the blog, but haven't updated their TOS yet... Or maybe they just want to keep it in the TOS in case you anger them and they want to claim you violated the TOS. Who knows?

 

[sunken]

Actually it doesn't seem to say that you can use a 3rd party player, it more says that they've made it possible to use the flash API to customize their player or use their player. Like the above poster though, I think the only way to know for sure is to write YouTube and find out what they say. We can speculate about what they mean, but only they know what they are willing to allow or not allow.

 

[SGBoise]

Thanks guys. I'll ask them and hopefully get an answer and post their responds here also.

 

[SGBoise]

I found several posts for using custom flash player and it looks like several other people have asked and basically the conclusion is you can use custom player but you don't get any support.

I hope this helps anyone else.