With all the hubbub over the Nexus 7 and Android 4.1, some of the less earth-shaking news to come out of Google I/O found itself just a bit overshadowed. That doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of stuff worth hearing about, and one of those interesting sessions from the event dealt with a new API about to come out for YouTube.

“But Android already does YouTube,” you protest. Indeed, but there’s quite a bit that limits just how its clips can be accessed. Developers can embed clips as if they were in web pages, or have an app pull-up the YouTube player itself to display a video, but there hasn’t been a full-featured, seamless way to watch YouTube video directly in other apps. That’s all changing with the new YouTube Android Player API.

Apparently, Google actually quietly previewed this with its Google I/O 2012 app, which used the unreleased API to display its own videos from the event. Once it goes public, we should see other apps start adapting this new method, bringing rich playback control to all. According to Google, it’s a snap for developers to use, taking all of three lines of code to implement. Support for this new API will extend all the way back to devices running Froyo. Sounds good to us!