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Carousel Cloud and YouTube

  • Updated

Overview

YouTube bulletins will now allow you to play YouTube videos, live videos, and YouTube playlists through your Carousel system on Supported Player Types.

Carousel Cloud now gives you the ability to incorporate video from YouTube as a part of your signage content. YouTube Bulletins can play individual videos, playlists, and YouTube livestreams.

Setup

This setup process is the same whether you want to use a YouTube Live stream for morning announcements, a dynamically changing playlist of videos you maintain, or individual videos on YouTube.

To set up a YouTube bulletin you will first need to find the perfect YouTube video. Once you have found your video, like above, click on the Share button below the video, this is going to pop up a modal like below.

You will need to copy this link to paste into Carousel to set up your YouTube bulletin. If you need the video to start at a specific point in the video, simply right-click on the video at the time you’d like it to start playing in Carousel, and select Copy video URL at current time from the options provided. The video will then play starting at the selected time in Carousel until the video ends.

If you are setting up a Live Video or a Playlist you will do the same thing to get your share link. You just need to go to the Live Video or Playlist and click the Share button to get the link you will need for Carousel.

Now that you have your link URL, log into Carousel to create your new YouTube bulletin. Navigate to the zone in which you would like to schedule the bulletin and select New Bulletin. Under the Dynamic section, select YouTube.

Once you have selected the YouTube bulletin, paste in the Share URL that you copied above. You will also be given the option to enable Captions. IMPORTANT NOTE ON CAPTIONS! Captions will only work if they were uploaded with the video in YouTube. Automatic captioning is not supplied by the YouTube API.

Then, simply configure your desired Schedule and Extras settings, and publish your bulletin.

Your YouTube bulletin is now ready to be shown to the world!

Additional Notes on YouTube Bulletins

  • YouTube bulletins are not supported on AppleTV media players.

    • AppleTV’s do not contain a web browser in which to display Youtube content and due to platform restrictions, the YouTube App can not be used in conjunction or within with another app (ie. Carousel Cloud Player).

  • Youtube bulletins have limited support for LG webOS players.

    • Due to hardware constraints on the LG platform, Youtube bulletins are only supported in a limited capacity. Displaying more than one or two Youtube bulletins on a channel using an LG webOS player will cause the display to periodically restart its self, resulting in a few seconds of a black screen before returning to displaying the signage channel.

  • Unlisted playlists are not supported within the integration.

  • Youtube stream bulletins do not follow the zone dwell time as they are intended to play the entire stream.

Captions

Carousel supports the ability to Enable Captions on your YouTube bulletins. What this means is if the video has captions uploaded to YouTube they will be played. The auto-generated captions that YouTube can sometimes provide will not be displayed by Carousel.

Restricted Videos

Region

YouTube has the ability to restrict certain videos by region or privacy levels. Region restriction will be limited to where the physical player is located. If you add a bulletin that is restricted to the US and the player is located outside of the US then the player will skip that video as it will not be able to play it.

Privacy

The same will work for privacy settings. If a video is public at the time you create the bulletin it will work perfectly, but if the owner switched the video to be private the players will skip that video.

Embedding Restrictions

If a video is only allowed to be played on specific domains, or if the video blocks embedding of specific domains, the player may have to skip the video. If the video plays in the Carousel’s Edit Bulletin page then it is a good indication that it will successfully play on your Carousel players.

YouTube Branding

At the end of some videos, you might notice YouTube branding to choose the next video, or check out this other content. If the content creator added that to the video Carousel is going to play it. We have no way to know what point of the video we are at so we just play everything that YouTube sends to us.

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