by Brian Walsh on June 10, 2009, under API, Clients, Development, Features, Uncategorized
Two subsystems within Castfire that rarely see the light of the day but power some of the amazing solutions for our clients are the feeds and api. Together, they power syndication, distribution, players and integrations. While they can be considered the same in nature, there are some distinct differences.
Feeds
The approach for feeds is to return structured data in a variety of formats. The most popular formats are supported (xspf, rss, mrss) and publicly available. As much as mrss is trying to be a standard, there are unfortunately many “flavors” available, from Truveo to Bebo to VodPod to – too many to list. All of the different “flavors” are available in our mrss feeds. The feeds are not only for your content as a whole or through a hierarchy – channels and content producers – but can also segment by categories, tags and syndication partners.
A fantastic example of this in action on each of the player biography pages Washington Redskins site (example). The flash player is passed a feed with the latest 10 videos tagged with that players name – a process their staff does religiously with each video. It provides a simple solution, to both code and manage, to place relevant videos into a website.
API
We often refer to our API as the leading indicator of traffic for the coming months, as new clients, integrations and solutions will often develop on the API prior to launching. To date, approximately 90% of the functionality available in our CMS is available through the API. Because of this, many of our solutions are built with deep integrations that do not require logging into the Castfire CMS.
From September, 2008 – May, 2009, we have seen a 2193% increase of usage across both the feeds and API. To put that into perspective, the full month of September’s usage was done in just over 32 hours in May! The new solutions currently being developed are all extremely dependent on both the API and feeds, creating immersive experiences for the audience and streamlined workflows for the publishers. We believe that this is key for our clients success.
If you are interested in learning more about our feeds and API’s, let us know.
I love the API. We use a custom video player created in flash and the API makes it very easy to pull in different channels of content. Les has some very cool things in store in the near future that will heavily use the API.