The YouTube Data API allows an application to interact with YouTube and perform a variety of operations; such as searching for videos, retrieve video information and upload a video on behalf of a user. The API also provides programmatic access to the video and user information stored on YouTube. This article demonstrates how you can retrieve information of a YouTube video (e.g. title, description, thumbnail, duration, views and rating) using the YouTube Data API and jQuery.
Starting from version 3, YouTube data API requires an application key and billing information just like Google maps. However, the API offers few million requests free each day. Authentication is not required for most read-only operations.
