YouTube offers multiple ways to upload content. The content delivery method you choose should depend on the type and amount of content you have, as well as the technical resources available to you. Correctly choosing your ingestion method can save you valuable time.
Basic upload
The simplest method for uploading a video and its metadata is the Upload page. You don't have a separate metadata file with this method; you enter the metadata manually after uploading the video. See this article for more details.
This option is ideal for partners who upload a few videos at a time. It doesn't require any special technical expertise, and the uploaded videos appear on YouTube right away. The down side is that there's no batch processing, nor any integration with any content management system. Also, the Upload page does not support uploading sound recordings, compositions, or videos you don't own worldwide; you need to use one of the bulk methods to upload these types of assets.
Bulk upload
If you have many assets to deliver, you'll want to upload them to YouTube in bulk by using the Package Uploader, which you can find under the Content updates
With bulk upload, you provide the metadata for all of the uploaded assets in a separate file. YouTube provides a collection of spreadsheet templates for metadata files to upload along with the media files you're delivering to YouTube. Each row in a spreadsheet represents the metadata for one asset. You can pre-validate the spreadsheet to avoid issues during upload. You can download spreadsheet templates from the Content updates page in Content Manager under the Templates tab.
High volume uploads
Partners who regularly deliver a large volume of assets (over 100 per month) can transfer their media and metadata files using either Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) or Aspera rather than the Package uploader. Aspera is much faster than SFTP and is the better option for delivering large media files. For partners who have an assigned Partner Technology Manager, YouTube also offers offline disk import, where you ship a disk containing basically unlimited amounts of content to a Google upload center. If you have a lot of content that you want to deliver to YouTube, but are not a directly managed partner, check out our partner program overview.
YouTube APIs
For ultimate control over your uploads, you can develop a custom uploading method using the YouTube APIs. Using the YouTube Data API and the YouTube Content ID API enables you to control status updates and fallback logic.