YouTube remains the best place to host video content for consumers and businesses alike, but the functionality does change every so often, usually without much of an announcement.  If you've been using YouTube to host the sales videos embedded on your site, you might remember that you used to be able to prevent the "related videos” from showing up after the video had finished playing but you don't seem to be able to anymore.  

As it turns out, as of September 25th, 2018, the API functionality was changed, and the simple checkbox was removed from the user interface. “An Embed API is the code generated when you use the embed option of the share function on YouTube videos.” 

The main changes in that update were to remove the option to prevent related videos from displaying after your video has played, and the option of not to displaying the video name and channel details. (side note: this also happened for videos cast from your mobile device to your TV which I personally find quite irritating.) 

The stated reason for these changes is to “Increase standardisation across platforms”. I find that to be a weak reason given the whole point of those options was to allow businesses to have relatively unbranded videos.  

While the call to remove name and channel details is entirely gone, (the code won’t work even if you had it before), the call to prevent related videos still does something. Where the value is set to 0, the related videos will only be videos from your own channel. This still isn’t great if you’re using the embed code on a sales page with one purpose (and therefore really don’t want other videos/links/content diluting your message), but I guess it’s better than random videos or user targeted videos showing up.  

As noted above you can’t set this value with the user interface anymore either. So, all future embeds will show random related videos unless you specifically change the provided embed code to include the call. 

Of course, I can help you with this if you’re not interested in editing code yourself. 

If you haven’t heard anything about these changes, that’s not surprising. Technically the changes were publicly announced on their embed API documentation page, but I have to say that’s not quite the same as sending out a media release to relevant news sites, is it? From what I can tell people are mostly noticing when the options that were available before are no longer there. I personally heard about it through the Clickfunnels Facebook group so shout out to them for sharing the news. 

This is all pretty disappointing to me as I’m generally a pretty big fan of Google (and by extension YouTube), but there’s no denying that this is a fairly hostile move towards the businesses using the YouTube platform for sales/marketing purposes. If you want to see the revision history of the embed API you can find that here.  

New! Super easy VHX video embeds on Tumblr

Try this:

Grab any VHX site URL. Like http://wolfchoirhomevideo.vhx.tv, for example. 

Paste it directly into a Tumblr video post.

There’s the trailer! Complete with the VHX Buy button, built right in there.  

No need to grab complex embed codes. Just copy/paste a VHX site and you’re good to go. Now anyone can share your VHX videos on Tumblr, and fans can watch the trailer and buy in a click. VIDEO PLAYER MAGIC. 

That was so easy, I’m going to do it again right here: 

Ok one last time: 

the idea of video embedding used to be a real challenge up until more recently. Before you used to have to chose from different formats that had to work with your computer, software, web-page, etc, when now there are just different codes and links that can be easily used to embed a video onto a webpage. oh technology...how you keep evolving for our benefit.

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutorials/web_graphics/article.php/3480061/How-To-Add-a-YouTube-Video-to-Your-Web-Site.htm