Video Streaming Company, Justin.tv, Launches Free, Open API

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. We know how hard it is to do, so instead of asking each of you to pay for servers and bandwidth, we just released our open, free API to the public."

According to Justin.tv, the new API--which, according to the blog, TechCrunch, will be monetized by advertising (eventually, a payment platform will be incorporated for developers who wish to deliver ad-free video)--has two components: a Rest API, which was built to provide information about already existing Justin.tv data and broadcasts; and a Flash Integration API, which includes a "live player" and a "broadcaster," both of which are billed as "fully customizable in appearance and behavior." In addition, the company adds, the new API opens up "our chat, along with our social chat channels." "The possibilities for live video applications are really only limited by your imagination," the company promises. "Want to create a custom-skinned player? You can do it. Integrate with your own service's existing profile and identity system? No problem. Think you can make a great live video search engine, if only you had access to the stream data? Now you have it. We're hoping to see all these applications...and more."

The company is also making available--and open sourcing--several applications that were developed using the new API. They include Camtweet, billed as "an open source, Ruby on Rails application that allows you to broadcast and chat on Twitter" ("Take it, play with it, change it, do whatever you like," Justin.tv's blog post announcing the new API tells developers. "We're giving it away for free"); Hot or Not Live, whose name is self-explanatory; Slumbervision, an online baby monitor; and a Justin.tv dashboard widget for Mac OSX. More information on the applications, including links to their source code, is available at: http://apiwiki.justin.tv/mediawiki/index.php/Application_Gallery; the home page for the new API is: http://www.justin.tv/p/api