Manage YouTube Videos and Live Events with an Agent Skill

Where this fits

A team's agent is asked to publish a finished demo video and schedule a live Q&A for the same product. Doing this with raw YouTube API calls means managing OAuth scopes, thumbnails, captions, playlist membership, and live broadcast states—all places where partial failures create messy state. youtube-publisher packages that workflow into a scripted skill with strict validation, so an agent can go from source file to published or live-ready state without improvising API calls.

Why agents benefit

• Runs a real TypeScript script (youtube-upload.ts) with all required parameters, eliminating hallucinated API calls and guessing.
• Handles the full live-event lifecycle: create scheduled broadcast, bind encoder stream, transition state, and clean up.
• Recovers from ambiguous uploads in a fail-closed way, preventing duplicate videos when a previous attempt may have succeeded.
• Uses writable-field-safe updates and non-destructive caption upserts, so existing YouTube data isn't overwritten accidentally.
• Keeps OAuth tokens and secrets out of logs, making agent runs safer to trace and debug.

Practical scenarios

Scheduled product launch with captions and playlist

Your agent receives a final MP4, a thumbnail, and an English subtitle file. It validates title length, description, and tags, uploads the video, sets the thumbnail, uploads captions, and adds the video to a launch playlist. The only returned value is the YouTube video ID for your CMS.

Live webinar broadcast lifecycle

You want a live event scheduled for next week. The agent creates a broadcast with a private link, generates/binds an encoder stream, and transitions it to testing, then to live at the right moment. When the event ends, it cleans up bindings and confirms the stream state.

Recovery after a network interruption

An upload times out and the agent cannot tell whether the video was created. Instead of uploading again and risking duplicates, youtube-publisher's fail-closed recovery checks the remote state and only resumes or retries when safe.

Add it to your agent workflow

Install the skill with one command:

npx skills add wlzh/skills --skill youtube-publisher

Then ask your agent to perform a concrete job after reading SETUP.md:

"Upload final.mp4 as Build AI Agents Faster with description from desc.txt, thumbnail cover.png, captions en.vtt, and add it to the playlist PLLaunchVideos."

The skill enforces that the script is actually executed in the order defined: authenticate, sanitize metadata, upload, then enrich.

Compare before adopting

Before making this a permanent part of your agent's toolkit, compare:

• Quality signals: Does the skill include CI, regression tests, and explicit failure recovery? The README changelog documents these.
• Maintenance freshness: Is it actively versioned and updated for YouTube API changes? v1.7.0 includes live lifecycle updates and tests.
• Alternatives: Raw YouTube Data API client code, other uploader skills, or your own internal script may cover only uploads; check if live events and captions matter to you.
• Workflow fit: Does your agent already handle files, auth, and metadata? The skill is most valuable when your media pipeline needs repeatable, safe publishing.

Why it is worth tracking

With 612 stars, a detailed changelog, and a strict execution rule that guards against skipped steps, youtube-publisher shows real maintenance discipline. Its OpenAgentSkill entry at https://www.openagentskill.com/skills/wlzh-youtube-publisher is a convenient place to watch its quality signals. Evaluate it now if you have any workflow where an agent must publish video unattended; revisit it when you add live events, captions, or playlist automation.