Sorenson Aims to Speed Web Development with 360 API
If you're interested in creating a video submission page on your site, perhaps for a user-generated video contest, you'll want to take a look at the Sorenson 360 API, which is being widely released today. This application programming interface (API) lets developers create pages that upload, manage, and encode video with minimal coding.
For an example of what you can do with the 360 API, look to the video wall on John McCain's Web site (which we covered last month. The page lets McCain supporters shoot and upload a video with their webcam or upload a pre-recorded video. The API was also used to create Sorenson's iPhone Challenge site and video e-card site Rattlebox.
The 360 API is available to anyone with a Sorenson 360 account (plans start at $99 per month), and Sorenson is offering free accounts to developers. For more, check out the just-launched developer site.
Sorenson released the 360 Video Delivery Network in 2009. With this release, it's taking the APIs from that and other Sorenson services and making them public. Access to Sorenson Squish and Squishnet lets users encode content within the browser and manage it. Sorenson 360 lets you serve videos anywhere online.
To get started with the 360 API, developers will first download the native language binding they prefer. Sorenson provides native bindings for all the major developer languages, including .NET, JAVA, PHP, and Ruby.
There are three primary classes of resources to the API:
• Account Classes: Used to interact with Sorenson 360 accounts
• Asset Management Classes: These let the users interact with video assets and track metrics
• Search-related Classes: Use these to organize videos into categories and add metadata.
"Users will notice right away that we have built the Sorenson 360 API entirely around the developer experience," says Sorenson Media CTO Mike Flathers. "We have worked hard to develop the most flexible, intuitive and easy-to-use API anywhere, so developers can focus on creating and managing video assets how they want to, without the time-consuming hassles of excessive coding or messing with server-side infrastructure."
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