Updated below: YouTube is expanding beyond its role as a destination and distributor of online video ... Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) video site has announced a slew of new services aimed at online publishers, allowing them to offer YouTube’s services directly to their users. While videos have always been distributed to third parties, the other community and management functions have been at YouTube.com. Now these parts, too, will be opened up. In a blog post describing the changes, the company cites plans from EA to let players grab clips and directly upload them to YouTube, rather than having to go to the actual site to do it. By providing YouTube as a service to publishers, the network is now in closer competition to numerous white-label video startups. The announcement doesn’t have anything specific to say on how advertising would be worked in—whether it would come from Google, or if a third party’s service could be plugged in (see below on an update on this term).

Among the launch partners: TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO), which announced that YouTube videos would available to users of the TiVo Series3 later this year. Release.

Updated: ATD’s John Paczkowski digs through YouTube’s terms of service on the new API, and comes up with something interesting: YouTube reserves the right to serve ads through a publisher’s API Client, but prohibits publishers from selling their own.