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.

A lot of time and effort go into both developing and using API’s.  Their strengths are documented throughout many products on the web. For me personally, Twitter and Flickr have been models of API’s that change the way I created applications. Looking at an API makes my imagination wander, my drive to tinker and create go wild.

However, API’s also require a certain level of aptitude. The user must understand the basics of programming, know what data to capture, what data to store, etc. In the end, an API may be used by millions but only understood by a small percentage of that.  There is, however, an API that we all know how to use: email.

[Side note: my fiancee pointed out to me the other day that I usually spell it "e-mail" with the hyphen. That's the way it was originally spelled.  She said I was showing my age!]

When we created our ftp functionality, we wanted to incorporate an easy method for publishers to be able to use the URL’s and embed statements in their websites without having to log back into Castfire. To accomplish this, after ftp’ing files to Castfire, two e-mails are sent:

1. Acknowledge the files have been uploaded and provide back the URL’s and embed statement for the new episode.  It also states that these files are not currently ready as they are being transcoded.
2. A final e-mail stating that the transcoding has finished and it is available for publishing.

The email is also "smart" because the directory structure of the publisher’s ftp site mirrors the hierarchy of their account. So a network login sees directories for each content producer and channel, as well as directories for each media type (intro, outro, promo).  Each content producer login sees a subset of the network. So a publisher can upload new episodes into the correct channel without having to log in to Castfire – including shows that have multiple content segments.

In addition, default settings, including filenames, metadata, and status can be set for each channel.  This is a huge time savings for the publisher as you can set it once and rarely have to revisit it.

We view these e-mails emails as the most basic API possible!  FTP and email have been around just about as long as the internet and are accessible to a great majority of web users. While it is possible to log in and publish shows through our CMS, it is many times faster and easier to ftp 10 new videos and get an email back when they are complete.

Sometimes it is shockingly evident to me that Castfire is able to move forward only because of the highly skilled members of the team. I have to publicly thank Christoph, Leo and David for each owning their part and getting this release into production. This week alone has seen 5 AM mornings — that’s finish, not start — three times!

To Christoph: yet again you amaze me, my friend. Castfire would not be here without the super human efforts you continually extend. As always, let’s keep moving on to the next release.