Automate the YouTube Research
Behind Your Newsletter

Pull a full week of transcripts from your curated research channels in a single API call. Run them through an AI summarizer. Walk into writing day with the raw material already prepared — no hours of video-watching required.

YouTube research is time-consuming and doesn't scale

If your newsletter covers a technical field, you likely have a list of 10–20 YouTube channels you check each week — conference talks, expert interviews, product walkthroughs, community discussions. Watching them all is impractical. Skimming is unreliable. You miss things. You write based on what you happened to catch, not what was actually most worth sharing.

The transcript is the text version of every video — machine-readable, skimmable, and summarizable. But pulling transcripts manually for dozens of videos every week is its own time sink.

VidProxy collects transcripts from your curated channels automatically, all week long. On Sunday morning, you make one API call, get everything, and hand it to your summarization step. Research hour is now research minutes.

The pull API vs. the push webhook

VidProxy supports two delivery modes. The webhook is for real-time push — it fires the moment a video is detected. For newsletter research, you often want the opposite: pull everything on a schedule and process it in a batch.

The Pull API is built for this. GET /api/videos?tag=AI+Research&since=7d returns every transcript from channels tagged "AI Research" over the past 7 days. One call. All your research. Ready to process.

A weekly research workflow in three steps

Set up once. Runs every week without manual intervention.

1

Subscribe to your research channels

Add all your curated YouTube channels to VidProxy. Label each subscription with a topic tag — "AI Research", "Market Analysis", "Dev Tools". VidProxy monitors them continuously and stores every new transcript as it's published.

2

Pull the week on a schedule

Set a cron job or n8n schedule to run every Sunday. Call GET /api/videos?tag=AI+Research&since=7d. The response contains all transcripts published in the past 7 days, sorted by publish date. On Pro, AI Enrichment summaries are already included.

3

Summarize and write

Pass the week's transcripts (or their pre-generated summaries) to a GPT prompt. Ask it to produce a ranked list of the most interesting ideas with one-paragraph explanations. Or generate draft newsletter sections directly. Your research context is built for you.

Weekly research digest script

A script that pulls the week's transcripts, summarizes them, and sends a research digest to your writing workflow.

# Pull everything from the past 7 days for a tag
curl "https://vidproxy.pro/api/videos?tag=AI+Research&since=7d" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer tr_live_xxxxxxxxxxxx"

# Response structure
{
  "videos": [
    {
      "channel_name": "Two Minute Papers",
      "video_title": "The New Reasoning Model That Changes Everything",
      "published_at": "2026-04-28T14:00:00Z",
      "transcript_text": "Welcome back, dear fellow scholars...",
      "summary": "Breakdown of new reasoning benchmark results...",
      "key_takeaways": ["3x improvement on math benchmarks", "..."],
      "topics": ["ai", "reasoning", "llm"]
    }
  ],
  "query": { "tag": "AI Research", "since": "7d", "count": 23 }
}
// weekly-digest.js — run every Sunday via cron
const VIDPROXY_KEY = process.env.VIDPROXY_API_KEY;
const TAGS = ['AI Research', 'Dev Tools', 'Market Analysis'];

async function buildWeeklyDigest() {
  // Pull all tags in parallel
  const results = await Promise.all(
    TAGS.map(tag =>
      fetch(`https://vidproxy.pro/api/videos?tag=${encodeURIComponent(tag)}&since=7d`, {
        headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${VIDPROXY_KEY}` }
      }).then(r => r.json())
    )
  );

  // Flatten and sort by publish date
  const videos = results
    .flatMap(r => r.videos)
    .sort((a, b) => new Date(b.published_at) - new Date(a.published_at));

  // Build context for GPT — use pre-generated summaries if available
  const context = videos.map(v =>
    `**${v.video_title}** (${v.channel_name})\n${v.summary || v.transcript_text.slice(0, 800)}`
  ).join('\n\n---\n\n');

  // Generate digest
  const digest = await openai.chat.completions.create({
    model: 'gpt-4o',
    messages: [{
      role: 'user',
      content: `You are a research assistant for a tech newsletter. Below are summaries of YouTube videos published this week. Identify the 5 most interesting ideas worth featuring. For each, write a 2-3 sentence explanation of why it matters to a technical audience.\n\n${context}`
    }]
  });

  // Send to Notion writing doc
  await pushToNotionDoc(digest.choices[0].message.content, videos.length);
}

buildWeeklyDigest();

Different research workflows, same API

The Pull API adapts to however your research process works.

Conference talk digests

Subscribe to conference channels (NeurIPS, WWDC, KubeCon). After a conference week, pull everything with since=14d and generate a "what happened at the conference" summary in minutes.

Earnings call monitoring

Subscribe to the investor relations channels of companies you cover. Pull transcripts quarterly with since=90d and generate comparative analysis across companies automatically.

Expert interview collections

Monitor channels that publish long-form expert interviews. Use keyword alerts to filter for guests who mention your topic area. Build a curated archive of relevant expert perspectives.

Multi-newsletter teams

Use different subscription tags per newsletter vertical. One VidProxy account, multiple team members, each pulling their own tag. Agency plan supports unlimited channels and webhooks.

Podcast transcript archive

Many podcasts publish on YouTube. Subscribe to the YouTube channel instead of dealing with RSS audio feeds. Get searchable, full-text transcripts of every episode automatically.

Academic research channels

Subscribe to university lecture series, research lab channels, and academic conference recordings. Build a searchable transcript archive for literature review work.

Common questions

How many channels can I monitor for research?
Free: 3 channels. Starter: 15 channels. Pro: 100 channels. Agency: unlimited. For a typical newsletter covering a single topic area, 15–30 channels covers the main sources well. Pro is the right tier for teams covering multiple beats or high-volume research workflows.
Do I need to use webhooks, or just the Pull API?
You can use either or both independently. For newsletter research, the Pull API is the natural fit — set up subscriptions to collect all week, then pull everything on publish day. You don't need a webhook URL at all if you prefer batch collection over real-time delivery.
Are summaries included in the Pull API response?
On Pro and Agency plans, AI Enrichment automatically generates a summary, key takeaways, and topic tags for every transcript. These are included in the Pull API response alongside the full transcript text — so you don't need to run a separate summarization step for each video. This is what makes the weekly digest script above so compact.
What's the rate limit on the Pull API?
Free and Starter: 60 requests per minute. Pro and Agency: 300 requests per minute. For weekly batch pulls, rate limits are rarely a constraint — a single call with a since=7d window returns all matching videos in one response.

Start collecting this week's transcripts now

Free tier is free forever. Add channels, start collecting, pull when you need them.

No credit card · Free tier forever