I would like to use the YouTube Android Player APIs in an new Android app. Can you shed some light on what the free usage limits are for this API? I am interested in how many videos can be played per day before hitting the free API limit.

I have already done some background research and here is what I know:

  1. The Android Player API uses the YouTube app and the YouTube Data APIs v3 to play videos.
  2. The programmer must supply a Data API v3 key which tracks usage.
  3. Access to the Data APIs v3 is limited to 5 million units per day per app.
  4. Different operations via the Data APIs v3 carry different costs in terms of units.

As far as I can see, the YouTube app is in control of placing requests to the Data API. How can I compute the reads / writes / updates, etc that the YouTube app uses on my behalf when I don't have the source code? And how can I translate these operations into units and then into actual videos? Videos are what I care about and what I can actually control via the Android Player API.

Let's take the video for Baby by Justin Beiber as an example. It is 3 minutes 45 seconds long and its id is kffacxfA7G4 and full URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4. What would it take in units to play this video if I supplied the id to the Android Player API as the starting point? How many different such videos can be played via the API per day?

EDIT: This question is largely directed at the people on the YouTube API team @ Google (like https://stackoverflow.com/users/385997/jeff-posnick) who use the youtube-api tag on StackOverflow

android youtube-api
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