Video Sharing website’s success relies on its API [kwiqq]

Posted on | January 22, 2009 | View Comments

Recently we conducted a research on the 15 top video API’s (Application Programming Interface). some interesting facts came out of the research:

1. Most video APIs (actually all) allow users to embed videos in some form or another. Generally by copying a bit of HTML.
2. (Second) most common use of the APIs is to search based on keywords.
3. The most common way to access an API was through JSON or XML-RPC. Although there are examples of APIs specifically for Flash, AJAX or Ruby
4. Although uncommon, increasingly sites allow maintenance of album where the videos are hosted, along side change in video and album information.
5. Rarely sites allowed video player visualisation change. i.e. customise how a video player looks. The only two sites which allow this are YouTube Player APIs or Joost API.

Build an Application

One of the most compelling APIs, apart from the ones mentioned above, is AOL’s latest acquisition Truveo. Truveo allows users to do a host of things including building a full on web or desktop application using AOL videos.

One of the most interesting business models is of Hey!Watch which allows small publishers to encode their videos for as less as $0.10. The video can be encoded in variety of formats (including MOV, WMV, 3G…) from sources like web, YouTube… with or without watermarks and can be transferred to any location easily (including your FTP or Amazon S3 accounts).

From the research it is clear that the winners are companies which offer extended APIs. No prizes for guessing the winner, YouTube. YT with hosts of features including Data APIs (search, upload videos and create playlists) and Player APIs (controls and interface), is perhaps one of the most sofisticated in the market and available for free.

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