YouTube allows videos to be strung together in playlists. YouTube allows embedded playlists to refer to video by index, as opposed to video UID.

For my thorium documentary, I’ll be improving chapters, and deprecating old chapters. How can the documentary (or any portion of it) be embedded in a way that will survive such iterations, and always show the latest/best version?

Here is Chapter 2 (the opening credits) embedded in a robust manner that will always show the latest version…

…embedded using parameter index=1…

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=SPKfir74hxWhPsAXSrCy--ORaxxbXdWnXK&index=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

…as opposed to YouTube’s default HTML for sharing…

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e-xzlklxMm4?list=SPKfir74hxWhPsAXSrCy--ORaxxbXdWnXK" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

…which does not survive chapter iteration.

Unfortunately, me having a robust embed doesn’t solve the problem of viral propagation… everyone else will be using YouTube tools for sharing. And most social network sites re-interpret the embed to use the video UID instead of the playlist & index combination.

I can only imagine this is why YouTube playlists are not used to propagate evolving content.