YouTube Channel Recent Uploads Scraper

Scrapes a YouTube channel's most recent uploads — title, description, view count, rating, thumbnail. No login, no API key.

Useful for monitoring competitor or creator channels, building a content calendar view, and tracking upload cadence.

What makes this different

Handles work directly, not just channel IDs. YouTube's own uploads feed only accepts a raw UCxxxxx channel ID — most people only know a channel by its @handle. This Actor resolves the handle to its real ID first by reading the channel page's own bootstrap data, so you can search by the same handle you'd type into YouTube itself.

Real engagement, not just a title list. Each row carries the actual view count and a 5-point rating (average + count) alongside the video metadata — figures a bare RSS reader would show you as raw XML, not clean structured fields.

Input

Field	Type	Notes
channels	array	Handle (with or without @), legacy username, or raw channel ID.
proxyConfiguration	object	Not normally needed.

One limit worth knowing up front

YouTube's uploads feed is a fixed window of the 15 most recent videos — there's no pagination parameter to reach further back. For tracking a channel's activity over time, run this on a schedule and let the dataset accumulate; a single run cannot retrieve upload history beyond the latest 15.

Output

{
  "video_id": "youtube.com:kN_iMEAi1dw",
  "channel_name": "Google for Developers",
  "title": "Build a live translation broadcast app with the Gemini Live API and LiveKit",
  "published_at": "2026-08-17T23:00:36+00:00",
  "view_count": 3230,
  "rating_average": 5.0,
  "rating_count": 136,
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN_iMEAi1dw"
}

A channel that doesn't exist fails with a clear message rather than returning an empty row. Each run also writes a RUN_COVERAGE record to the key-value store with what was requested, what came back, and any per-channel failures.

Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt
python test_local.py GoogleDevelopers --out sample_output.json
python test_local.py UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw

sample_output.json is real output from a live run.