Acting on behalf of a content owner

Each object in the YouTube rights management system is associated with a content owner . A content owner is a YouTube partner who has the rights to a collection of assets. When an application uses the YouTube Content ID API, it must have authorization from the content owner for the assets, policies, and claims it creates or manipulates. It receives that authorization when the authenticated user of the application has access to a content owner account. If the authenticated user doesn't have access to a content owner account, calls to the Content ID API fail.

Retrieve a content owner's ID

To retrieve a content owner's ID, call the YouTube Content ID API's contentOwners.list method. The API response contains a list of contentOwner resources associated with the user who authorized the request. In each resource, the id property specifies the content owner's ID.

For an example that retrieves the content owner ID programmatically, see Uploading and Claiming a Video .

Call YouTube APIs on a content owner's behalf

YouTube Content ID API

Because most users have access to a single content owner account, the Content ID API can implicitly determine the content owner that the user is acting as. As such, the onBehalfOfContentOwner parameter is optional for Content ID API calls.

However, some users have access to multiple content owner accounts. For these users, each API request must include the onBehalfOfContentOwner parameter to explicitly identify which content owner account to use.

YouTube Data API (v3)

Many YouTube Data API methods also support the onBehalfOfContentOwner parameter. The methods that use that parameter employ delegation , allowing an application to perform actions either on channels managed by the content owner, on videos in those managed channels, or on other API resources.

When using delegation in the YouTube Data API, the onBehalfOfContentOwner parameter is always required. The parameter's value is an ID that uniquely identifies the content owner. You can retrieve the ID programmatically by calling the YouTube Content ID API's contentOwners.list method.

Some API calls also require an additional delegation parameter. The list below describes two examples:

• The videos.insert() method requires the onBehalfOfContentOwner and onBehalfOfContentOwnerChannel parameters to be set when the user is performing an action on a channel as a content owner. The new video is uploaded to the channel that the onBehalfOfContentOwnerChannel parameter value specifies.
• The search.list() method requires the onBehalfOfContentOwner and forContentOwner parameters to be set. In this case, the forContentOwner parameter lets the user instruct the API to only return resources owned by the content owner that the onBehalfOfContentOwner parameter specifies.

The documentation for each specific method details when it supports delegation and whether you need to set an additional parameter besides onBehalfOfContentOwner .

YouTube Analytics API

To retrieve a content owner report using the YouTube Analytics API, you set the ids parameter value in your API request to contentOwner==OWNER_ID , where OWNER_ID specifies the content owner's ID.