ffwd Releases Video Discovery and Sharing API

Kevin Farnham, January 14th, 2009

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ffwd is an online community that lets members discover new videos selected based on their interests and favorite shows, and share videos with friends. The “ffwd” button lets you fast-forward to the next video in the sequence if you’ve seen enough of the current video — kind of like channel surfing for the Net. ffwd have now released an API to let developers build ffwd applications on any web-enabled video device. Specifically, ffwd’s new API will enable developers to:

• make requests for a variety of data from the ffwd site
• link ffwd profiles into other applications and mashups
• get live updates on what people are watching on ffwd

At the API launch, ffwd announced that Boxee, the “social media center” that runs on Mac OS X or Linux and interfaces with HDTVs, plans to use the ffwd API in forthcoming product releases (more at our boxee mashup profile).

To get started with the ffwd API, developers need to have ffwd account and request an API key. The API itself is REST-based with data returned in XML. The API documentation includes a usage overview, a methods list, and a parameters list. See our ffwd API overview for more details.

ffwd joins a very crowded segment of the API market: we now have 57 video APIs in our directory.