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Announcing Ooyala's next generation of APIs

August 25, 2011
By Phil Crosby
Today we are launching the next generation of APIs. It’s available to everyone, starting right now.

Our customers use APIs extensively to leverage Ooyala's technology in their systems and workflows. Examples include integrating Backlot’s video capabilities into existing Content Management Systems, programmatically creating feeds and syndicating data to partners, and querying our analytics data to power custom reports.

Since APIs are such a fundamental and powerful set of building blocks, they are important to get right. When done right, they can help enable any vision you can conjure. Thanks to everything learned thus far we have seriously turbo-charged our APIs in three main areas:

1. Developer friendliness
These APIs heavily leverage "REST", an architecture which focuses on resources (objects) instead of the actions you can perform on them. This is great because every resource in our API now works the same way: getting a list of players is the exact same process as getting a list of videos or feeds. The only difference is the URL. You'll notice how refreshing this approach is when you see how simple and short our new API documentation is, and it's largely because of REST.

We know that it's a pain to initially figure out a new set of APIs. To jump this hurdle, we are making it incredibly easy to dive in and play with these APIs without writing a single line of code, thanks to our new API Scratchpad. In the online API documentation you'll notice that most APIs have a link to a live example which opens in the API Scratchpad -- you can tweak and play with these calls right in the browser using your own account or a sample account.

2. Comprehensiveness
We've greatly expanded the power and scope of the APIs to provide better building blocks. You can now programmatically create feeds and syndications, create and customize players and associate them with videos, edit a video's publishing rules and playback restrictions, and query your content by your own custom metadata. And that's just the big new stuff -- there are a slew of smaller improvements and new features throughout the APIs.

3. Security
Each Backlot user now has their own API credentials, instead of having just one set of global per-account credentials. Since you have multiple API keys, you can now adjust the permissions on those keys and hand out less-privileged keys to your partners.

Additionally, MRSS feeds created in Backlot can optionally be secured using "access keys". When enabled, you can give a partner the URL to one of your feeds, and then revoke access at a later date if you like.

A new generation of APIs marks a milestone for any technology company. It means that businesses are building sophisticated solutions on top of our platform and demanding better and better building blocks. We hope our tools will ignite your imagination, and we know these APIs will make solutions on top of our technology faster to build and much more powerful. Enjoy!
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