Adobe Launch extension update: YouTube Playback v1.5 - video milestones!

A new milestone has been reached for my YouTube Playback extension for Adobe Experience Platform Launch. With version 1.5.0, video milestones can now be tracked! (And also customised states when the video is playing.)

YouTube playback extension for Adobe Launch

For a long time, I've resisted adding video milestone tracking to my extension for one simple reason: it's not actually a supported feature in YouTube's IFrame API. My goal for my extension was to ensure that whatever functions that YouTube exposed in its API could be accessed through my extension with no (or little) coding.

To that extent, I had succeeded. But my extension's users wanted more. And top of their list was video milestones. This is where pre-set milestones, like 25%, 50% or 75% of the video, will trigger Events that Adobe Launch can detect and operate on. Whenever someone asked me for it, my usual response was "That's not in the API, so you'll have to write your own custom code for it."

But that response was clearly not what my users wanted to hear. So now, video milestone tracking is built right into my YouTube Playback extension. There's a dedicated "Video Milestone" event type for it, and you can choose to set milestones by percentages or seconds.

Configuring the "Video Milestone" event type
Configuring the "Video Milestone" event type

There is a corresponding "Video Milestone" data element type that returns the milestone that has been reached when this event is triggered.

But if one new feature isn't enough, there's another feature that some users might enjoy: the "Video Playing" event type can now be configured to be tracked uniquely when the video is started (after being loaded), resumed (after being paused), and replayed (after it has ended).

I hope that my extension's users enjoy these new features in their video analytics work.

If you discover any errors with the extension, or if you have a neat idea that I should incorporate, please open an issue at my GitHub repository.

Read the blog post about the original v1.0 release!

Also, read the blog post about the v1.2 update!

(Aside: This update took me about 26 hours to program, because I had to rewrite the logic a few times to optimise the extension as much as possible.)

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