YouTube To Publishers: Make Your Own YouTube

Want to start your own YouTube? Now you can, with YouTube's help. As we reported last week, Google (GOOG) is opening up YouTube's infrastructure and allowing publishers to use the service to power their own sites.

What does this mean? If you work YouTube's new services into your Web site, your visitors can upload video directly to YouTube without leaving your site. You keep the page views -- and their attention -- and don't have to pay for video hosting. Google, in turn, can presumably sell ads on your content. (Today's announcement doesn't say anything about ads/revenue sharing, so we're assuming Google keeps all of the ad revenue in exchange for the free service.)

Other features: Edit YouTube metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc) on any site, fetch custom feeds, and customize the way the YouTube video player looks and works.

Examples? From YouTube's blog:

The number of possible new applications is endless. Electronic Arts (ERTS) 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 (TIVO) is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.

Who is Google disrupting? Mostly so-called "white-label" video hosting services like Twistage, VSocial, Brightcove, and VideoEgg, which is doing fewer of these deals to focus on its ad network.

Earlier: Google's YouTube To Power Other Video Sites?