API

Here is a round-up of some other interactive TV-related stories we didn't have room for in this issue:

Video search engine company, blinkx, on Wednesday announced the launch of a TV API, which it says is designed to provide partners in the "fast-growing connected-TV ecosystem"--including CE and set-top box manufacturers, game console vendors and app developers--access to its index of approximately 35 million hours of online video.

Livestream, (formerly Mogulus), a New York-based company which offers a platform that enables amateurs and professionals to produce and distribute live TV on the Internet (note: the company, which offers free and premium versions of its platform, bills the platform as offering, among other things, the ability to mix multiple live cameras, imported video clips and overlay graphics, and as allowing producers to broadcast live from a mobile phone, use a customizable Flash player with integrated chat, and develop a branded channel page on its Web site that incorporates interactive chat--for an in-depth overview of Livestream and its platform, see the interview with its co-founder

In a posting on its corporate blog Sunday night, Justin.tv, a San Francisco-based company that bills itself as "the largest online community for people to broadcast, watch and interact around live video," announced the launch of a free, open API. "We want to make live video ubiquitous across the Web," the blog post stated. "We know there are dozens of use cases that live video would be perfect for: customer support, pay-per-view entertainment, remote education, collaborative gaming...the list is expanding every day. Unfortunately we can't build all of them, there are just too many. Instead, we want to let all of you build these applications.

Broadband video service provider, Joost, says that it will shortly release an alpha version of a "Widget API" for developers interested in building widgets for its Flash-based player. In a posting on its Joost Labs site, Tuesday, the company embedded a demo of a widget that uses the underlying video's metadata to search Twitter for tweets on topics related to the video and that then displays those tweets on top of the video. "Technically," Joost explains, "widgets are separate SWF files that are loaded by the Joost Player and displayed on top of the video.

In a post on his company's blog, Tuesday, boxee CEO, Avner Ronen, announced the "boxee App Dev Challenge," a competition designed to encourage developers to build new applications based on boxee's recently launched API (note: for more on the boxee API, see [itvt]'s interview with Ronen in Issue 8.38). "While people are working on a variety of boxee apps," Ronen wrote, "we thought it would be a good idea to provide some extra incentive for the developers."

Broadband video content provider, Next New Networks, has released a new application for the Boxee over-the-top-TV platform, using the recently launched Boxee API (note: for more on the latter, see [itvt]'s interview with Boxee founder and CEO, Avner Ronen, in Issue 8.38). The application is intended to make it easier for Boxee users to access Next New Networks' 16 networks, which include Channel Frederator (cartoons), Barely Political (political comedy), Fast Lane Daily (automobile news), Indy Mogul (DIY film making), ThreadBanger ("indie" style), TMI Weekly (style and technology) and $99 Music Videos.