YouTube throws indie developers a bone after cutting off Microsoft

YouTube significantly raised the quotas for its API Friday, making it easier for third-party developers to build apps that access the service. This comes a week after YouTube cut off Microsoft’s Windows Phone YouTube app, causing a huge kerfuffle and provoking a stern public response from a Microsoft executive.

Just like many other services with a public API, YouTube puts some quota limits on its API access to make sure that developers don’t abuse the service, and presumably also to be able to strike direct deals with companies that outgrow these kinds of usage levels.

On Friday, YouTube announced that these limits are increased tenfold, while the amount of “points” necessary to upload a video to YouTube at the same time is significantly decreased. With the new model, app developers could theoretically let their users upload around 30,000 videos to the site each day. Previously, uploads were limited to around 300 videos per day.

These changes come just a week after YouTube very publicly faced off with a rather well-known third-party developer: Microsoft relaunched its own Windows 8 YouTube app last week, only to quickly find it cut off by YouTube. The video service said at the time that it was Microsoft’s fault for not building the app in HTML5, but Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President & Deputy General Counsel David Howard alleged in a lengthy response that YouTube was just making up reasons in order to make it impossible for Microsoft to build a YouTube app.

via GigaOM http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/g94Uy6w8_m0/