Part 2 – Creating YouTube live streams programmatically
Authentication with the YouTube Data API from Python
This is the second project for which I’ve had to go through and figure this out, so I wanted to write this down. There are a couple oddities with the YouTube Data API:
One great thing about computers is that they can be programmed to do things that are repetitive and boring. I try to look around in my life to see what things I can get a computer to do for me, so that I don’t have to do it myself.
Today’s case is scheduling weekly YouTube live streams for my church. Every week someone’s got to schedule the live streams for the upcoming weekend. They look like this:
So you might be thinking, this seems pretty trivial, like it’s just a few clicks to schedule this in YouTube. It can’t take more than 10 minutes. And that’s true, but it’s still straightforward and repetitive. Having to figure out which Sunday is coming up, copying and pasting and ensuring the correct dates and times are replaced in the live stream text, and making sure the scheduled dates and times are correct can become tedious work. And it’s the same procedure week after week: the type of processing that computers love to do.
Sure there are other ways to optimize this process, like batching it to create maybe two or more weeks at a time. However, from a viewer’s perspective it can also be confusing when there are a bunch of upcoming live streams that need to be scrolled through. For the purposes of this project, the optimal frequency is to have one set of upcoming live streams visible at any time, and that means having the computer schedule the next set of live streams once every week.
So let’s get the computer to do this. I’m going to split up this blog post into two parts:
