How to get YouTube channel's trailer and featured video via the Data API?

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I'm trying to use the YouTube Data API to get a channel's Trailer and Featured Video but can't find anything in the [API docs][1] or responses that might provide it. Ideally, there'd be something that would return the ID of whichever videos had been selected here: https://studio.youtube.com/channel/[CHANNEL_ID]/editing/sections

Maybe it's buried in an obscure endpoint. Maybe the API simply doesn't include this anywhere. Can anyone please point me in the right direction?

Update: I've found the channel trailer as unsubscribedTrailer under the channels:list endpoint with the brandingSettings part. However, for some reason Google has decided not to include the featured video with it.

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1 Answers

One more time YouTube Data API v3 doesn't provide a basic feature.

As Video spotlight you can have:

Featured video for returning subscribers Highlight a video for your subscribers to watch. This video won’t be shown again at the top of your page for subscribers who have watched it. Learn more

Source: https://studio.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID/editing/sections

For the featured video:

  1. you first need to subscribe to the give YouTube channel. To do so in an automatic way, use YouTube Data API v3 Subscriptions: insert endpoint.
  2. then open your web-browser Network developer tool tab (Ctrl + Shift + E on FireFox) and filter HTML requests, then visit https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID and copy the initial request to CHANNEL_ID as cURL, that way you can re-execute this cURL request for any channel you are subscribed to by changing the URL in the cURL request to https://www.youtube.com/channel/ANOTHER_CHANNEL_ID. Furthermore you'll find the featured video id in the JavaScript variable ytInitialData in the JSON entry contents/twoColumnBrowseResultsRenderer/tabs/0/tabRenderer/content/sectionListRenderer/contents/0/itemSectionRenderer/contents/0/channelFeaturedContentRenderer/items/0/videoRenderer/videoId.

The channel with id UCv_LqFI-0vMVYgNR3TeB3zQ have both a channel trailer (1RHxvM8mQS4) and a featured video (rFuip5CSWcA).

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