What is a Video API?

Video is becoming an integral part of modern websites, and is increasingly consumed by users on the go with smart mobile devices. Website owners, content publishers, video streamers, and traditional media companies, all need efficient ways to prepare and deliver video content online.

A video application programming interface (API) can create, store, and display video to end users. Many video APIs also provide a way to analyze the video or live stream that viewers want to see. Most Video APIs are very flexible, allowing you to add videos to any type of website, web application or mobile application.

Video Streaming APIs: Key Capabilities

Video APIs commonly include one or more of the followin capabilities.

Live Streaming

A live streaming API typically provides the following capabilities:

• Transcoding—preparing the video for distribution and reliable playback. This means converting it to a format that is easy to share, such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) or MPEG-DASH.
• Delivery—video APIs typically integrate with a content delivery network (CDN), allowing caching and fast delivery of video from a point of presence (PoP) physically near to your users. This can reduce buffering and improve the user experience.
• Security—enabling you to define if a video stream should be public or private, and ensuring unauthorized parties cannot access private streams.
• Storage—video APIs may provide the ability to store video files on local storage, or may integrate with cloud storage and video hosting services.

Analytics

Many video APIs provide analytics capabilities, which allow you to monitor video activity by your users, and create a personalized video experience. For example, you can provide customized recommendations for the next video users should watch.

Video APIs can provide statistics on video sessions, including which videos, categories or themes were viewed by users, events like play, pause, rewind or exit, location and browser information, and duration of videos viewed.

Some video APIs also provide artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities based on deep learning for computer vision algorithms. These can include automatic classification of video content, video search, automatic captions, automated tuning of video codecs, and dynamic cropping of video to focus on the most important content in the text.

Video on Demand (VOD)

Some video APIs let you serve video content in a VOD model:

• Setting video streams as public or private, and adding monetization for video content.
• Adding subtitles for videos in different languages, which can attract more users to view a video.
• Breaking up long videos into chapters, enabling viewers to access the parts they want to see.

What is the Difference Between a Video Player API and a Live Video Streaming API?

Here are some of the key differences between video players and live streaming APIs.

Video player APIs allow you to customize HTML5 video players by:

• Adding or removing player features like social sharing, sound control, HD, etc.
• Insert a logo, custom colors and branding
• Customize autoplay behavior
• Show or hide the current number of viewers
• Resize the player, or enable dynamic resizing to suit the user’s device and screen size
• Insert ads and breaks into live streams for monetization
• Switch between multiple live feeds in in a single player window

Real-time video streaming APIs let you:

• Create a new live video stream
• Start or stop streams
• Define stream names, descriptions and tags
• Change privacy and monetization settings
• Process recorded live streams

So while a video player API lets you customize the end-user experience when watching a video, video streaming APIs allow you to create and deliver video content to your users.

Top Video APIs

YouTube Data API

The YouTube Data API offers programmatic access to YouTube videos, allowing users to receive feeds, search videos and view content. This is a RESTful API and responses are provided in XML.

Applications can authenticate users so they can modify playlists and upload videos. You can use this API to personalize your application or website using your existing information. You can also rate and comment on videos and more.

IBM Cloud Video APIs

Ustream was incorporated into IBM, giving rise to the IBM Cloud Video platform. Developers use IBM Cloud Video to create applications for video streaming and personalize the viewing experience, as well as to analyze telemetry and engagement.

APIs include the IBM Cloud Video Player API and the IBM Cloud Video Channel API. The video player API enables the creation and customization of an embedded live player for videos and live streams. The channel API allows you to remotely manage your channels, record videos and adjust security settings.

Vimeo API

Vimeo allows filmmakers to host, share and stream videos on an open platform. You can use the Vimeo API to optimize videos, embed videos in your own application or website, view metadata and set up playbacks. The RESTful API provides responses in JSON format and can handle a range of actions for any type of video, including hosting, uploading, transcoding and playback.

IVA Video

Internet Video Archive offers an Entertainment Express API that allows users to retrieve metadata for TV, movies and video games, along with promotional visual and video assets. With ever-expanding data collection, you can use the API to access content such as movies, TV series, music clips and video game trailers. You can also aggregate this data into your own application with ease.

Rovi (Tivo) Cloud Services API

Rovi merged with Tivo in 2016, offering API documentation for Tivo products. Tivo provides technology for digital entertainment services and devices, as well as entertainment data and content protection. Rovi Cloud Services offers APIs for retrieving metadata, accessing advertising, providing recommendations, and setting up management and analytics.

Conclusion

In this article, I covered a three important capabilities of video APIs:

• Live streaming - video APIs enable delivery of video content to users as a high quality live stream.
• Analytics - video APIs make it possible to see how users interact with video content and evaluate its performance.
• VOD - some video APIs make it possible to package video content as video on demand (VOD) services, including features like automatic classification and captioning.

In addition, I discussed some of the world’s most popular video APIs, including those provided by YouTube, IBM Cloud, Vimeo, IVA, and Rovi.

I hope this will be of help as you improve your organization’s ability to deliver online video to users.