Background Requirements
To be able to upload videos to YouTube via SFTP or Aspera, you will need the following 4 pieces of information to set up your dropbox account:
- A YouTube account name to which your videos will be uploaded. This should be a YouTube account you have already registered.
- The name of the dropbox account. This should be provided by your YouTube Technical Account Manager.
- The public portion of an SSH keypair. View instructions on how to generate this key on various platforms and how to add it to the configuration of your YT dropbox account in CMS.
- An e-mail address to notify once videos go live on the site after being delivered to the dropbox. This should be either a team email alias or a list of addresses separated by colons. We will use these email addresses to notify you in the event of errors.
Choose an upload method
To create new assets, you need to upload the reference files, the metadata files, and any supporting files such as custom thumbnails. You have options for uploading these files:
- Use the Upload page at youtube.com
- Copy the files into a YouTube-provided dropbox
- Write an application that uses the YouTube Content Partner API
Basic youtube.com upload
The simplest method for uploading a video and its metadata uses the Upload page at youtube.com. You don’t have a metadata file with this method; you enter the metadata manually after uploading the video. See this article for more details.
This option is ideal for partners who upload a few videos at a time. It doesn’t require any special technical expertise, and the uploaded videos appear on YouTube right away. The down side is that there’s no batch processing, nor any integration with any content management system.
Dropbox
Partners who regularly deliver a large volume of assets (over 100 per month) can use the “dropbox” method of uploading files. You copy your media and metadata files into a folder on a cloud-based server, from which YouTube uploads them as a batch.
The upload from the dropbox to YouTube occurs using either Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) or Aspera. Aspera is much faster than SFTP, but it requires you to purchase a client license.
A dropbox is the best solution for partners who need to automate regular uploads and manage their numerous YouTube assets. You can configure the process to automatically upload content from your content management system to the dropbox. However, the time-consuming technical setup makes a dropbox impractical and expensive for partners with fewer videos.
YouTube Content ID API
Uploading assets using the YouTube Content ID API enables you to control status updates and fallback logic.
Upload and claim your videos at youtube.com
The process of uploading a video to YouTube has a few extra steps for a YouTube content partner. In addition to processing the video, YouTube also creates a new asset, claims the video for the new asset, and applies a policy that specifies how to handle the video.
To upload a video as a YouTube content partner:
- Sign in to YouTube with a user name that is linked to your YouTube partner account.
- Click the Upload link at the top of the page.
- Select the video you’d like to upload. You can click the large up-arrow icon to open a file selection dialog box or drag-and-drop the video file onto the page.As YouTube uploads the video file, the Edit details page for the video appears. You can optionally add a title, description, or tags for the video and set its privacy status.
- Click the Monetization tab.
- Specify the type of asset to create for this video.YouTube recognizes different asset types based on the type of content they represent, such as music videos, web videos, and movies. The Asset information section at the bottom of the page has a radio btn for each available asset type, with the default asset type for your account selected. To change to a different asset type, click the radio btn next to the desired asset type.
You can’t change the asset type once you save it at step 8.
- Set the policy to associate with this video.The Usage policy drop-down list shows the policies available in your account, with your default usage policy selected (or Track in all countries if you don’t have a default usage policy). Select a different policy to override the default.
- If you are registered for YouTube’s Content ID system, specify whether to create a reference from the uploaded video.To enable Content ID matches for this asset, select the Enable Content ID matches check box and select a Match policy from the drop-down list. (These controls do not appear if you are not registered for Content ID.)
- Click Save changes.
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