Second iteration of Browser-Based Yahoo! Media Player under beta

The second iteration of browser-based Yahoo! media player rolled-out yesterday. Here's how it works:

1. Link to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.

2. Add a line of code to insert our Javascript library. Yahoo! will host this, so you just have to point to the URL.

3. Working play buttons appear next to MP3s.

The first iteration of this project, which was released last summer, enabled playback of 30-second samples and tracks from Yahoo!'s own music subscription service on the Yahoo! Music web site.

What's new is supporting third party media on third party web pages.

The Flash player that was recently released on next.yahoo.net is a sibling. It has many of the same roots, code, and features and it is maintained by the same team. Although they don't look the same, in a way they are different skins over a single underlying product. Sometimes you need Flash and sometimes you need Javascript, but either way you're playing the page.

The documentation and community home for the project is a public wiki at Wikia.

Some things that are interesting about the player:

• The interface between your document and media player's library is unobtrusive Javascript and semantic HTML: even though this library is Javascript internally, the API is HTML.
• The API is fairly rich. You can control the playlist sequence. You can tell the song title. You can operate in strict mode or quirks mode. To learn more, see How To Link on the wiki.
• A new generation of playlist technology by turning the page into a playlist. Player knits all the songs in the page together so that they play one after the other. The result is continuous play within the hosting web page.
• It's different from a normal library in that users don't need to install their own copy. This makes it easier for users to adopt, and it allows us to do ongoing maintenance at web speed.
• If you fool around with the player you'll find that you can click through to a Yahoo! search on the song title. A simple and unintrusive way for Yahoo! to monetize the traffic.