How To Subscribe to YouTube Videos Via RSS

YouTube makes subscribing to other users’ channels very easy. But for this you would need your own YouTube account. And if you’re concerned about privacy, this might not be an ideal situation, since YouTube lists an account’s subscribers publicly. You can instead use RSS!

If you’re a regular reader here, you’re likely to be familiar with RSS–really simply syndication. It’s basically XML, and lets sites easily syndicate or aggregate content from other sites. This makes it easy for users to build collections of favorite content, and these are updated each time new content is published at the source site.

RSS users usually have a preferred RSS client or aggregator. This way there is no need to access separate sites or applications. Subscribing to YouTube channels via RSS instead of using your YouTube account itself can therefore make things easier, if you prefer to access all your content (from blogs, podcasts, and even video) from one place.

There are several ways to subscribe, but my favorites are by tag and by user.

To subscribe by tag, simply key in this URL to your RSS reader: feed://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/[insert tag here]/videos.rss .

To subscribe by user, use this one: feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert username here]/videos.rss .

I tried subscribing to the Google YouTube channel using my Bloglines account. First, I input the feed URL.

Then I choose a folder to save it under. After saving, I check out the subscription if the latest videos are indeed there. And voila:

I can watch YouTube videos from the comfort of my own RSS reader.