Video screens at your business location - Remote Control

Say you have a business and would like to display some videos on screens you have at different locations. You've looked and found some videos which you would like to use on related YouTube channels: do you need to acquire the video files to show those video on your screens?

Luckily you DO NOT need to try to get hold of the video files. You can show videos, and control how they appear with a simple URL using a few parameters! 👍

EXAMPLE
Here's a ready made playlist - five Ford KA+ videos with dogs.

An embed URL viewed in a browser let's you click to play the videos, but that's not particularly useful for displaying on a screen, it would finish playing and need restarting.

Craft a more useful URL with YouTube parameters

You can easily do all sorts of things withe the videos in the playlist by adding variables to the embed URL. Additional parameters following the initial instruction (after the question mark) are added using an & sign. They can be added or used in conjunction with each other. Here are some examples.

▶ autoplay

Autoplay will START the video or video playlist automatically. The parameter is added as &autoplay=1

▶ loop

Loop means the playlist will start again after reaching the end. The parameter is added as &loop=1

▶ mute
Adding mute means the video will play muted. The parameter is added as &mute=1

The list of parameters available is long so I won't go into them all here, adding them follows the same process. You can do things like hide, show and specify the language of captions (where available on the video).

When you understand how to control the player using crafted URL and variables the more exciting thing is to consider that you can control the playlist content separately.

Create an unlisted playlist on your YouTube channel which is for example shown looped on screens at your business. You can add, remove or reorder content that is shown on those screens simply from a desktop computer, laptop or from any location using the mobile YouTube mobile App on your phone.

If you wanted to delegate that task to multiple people create the playlist on a brand channel: any manager for the brand account associated with the YouTube channel the playlist is on can be asked to add, remove or reorder content being shown on the screens.

Use-cases

There are lots of use-cases for displaying videos on screens for people at a location using this method, but as an example consider a car dealership which might wish to show the latest videos, adverts, technical videos from multiple manufactures. This method would be ideal for that, with no requirement or need to ask for access for any video files.

Limitations

You are streaming video from the internet, so that requires an internet connection. Availability is not guaranteed indefinitely: if the content owner removes the video from their YouTube channel the video will be unavailable to play in the playlist, but they deleted videos are easily removed when new ones are added!

Note: this information was originally written up as a Google+ post and has been added here so it's available after April 2019.

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