2021 in review: lightning-fast video transcoding & playback and many new product features!

As the year comes to an end, we wanted to take a moment to look back at everything the team released to help you build your video products (and to share a surprise)!

Let's start with our core principle: make videos available worldwide in seconds. For years, it has been highly complicated to add video features to apps and platforms because of the various services you had to aggregate (ingest, transcode, host, deliver, analyze). Our goal is to bring you a dead-simple API to implement the entire video workflow in minutes and provide an exceptional experience to your end-users, whether they are creators or your audience. In 2021 we've welcomed users from 122 countries (astonishing!) and have ingested 110% more video minutes than in the previous year.

Providing the greatest video performances for your app

• All videos you send to us have never been transcoded faster. Our recent benchmark reveals that a 5-minute video is available for playback in 6 seconds with api.video. In contrast, other services take up to 60 seconds.

• Once the video is uploaded, your audiences expect an exceptional playback with no buffer or latency. We have been delighted to discover the PlayerX benchmark. Considering all B2B and B2C video platforms, api.video provides the greatest viewer experience on the Market!

The best part of that? This is nothing compared what we'll bring you in 2022!

New features

We've introduced a lot of new features, most of them inspired by your feedback 🙏

• After releasing live streaming in 2020, we added private live streaming to help your users broadcast their video feed securely into your app.
• Progressive upload was released earlier this month to let you build recording features that your users can launch right from their browser or record a video directly from a video stream.
• Thanks to the webhooks, you are now notified when on-demand and live videos are ready to be played.
• Clipping became available a few days ago. This new feature allows you to edit your videos right from the service without downloading them first.

Reduce your workload and make api.video available in your CMS

To help you launch your product fast, we've added many new ways to implement api.video in your stack:

• 8 (yes...8!) new clients were published on our GitHub account: PHP, Python, Go, Java, NodeJs, C#, Android, and iOS
• If you are using a CMS to build your portal, you can now install our official plugins for WordPress, Contentful, Bubble.io, and Moodle to allow your users to upload and share videos right from their backend.
• To enable customization of the video experience, we've also released standalone plugins for analytics, the video uploader modules for Flutter, Android & iOS, and the live streaming modules for ReactNative, Android, Flutter, and iOS.

New branding

You may have noticed our new logo last summer, but there is more. Check out our fully redesigned dashboard that lets you easily switch between your environments, create, view, and edit videos. Plus, you can share the on-demand and live stream videos you're managing and access your KPIs and metrics! The new dashboard also lets you switch from one plan to another at any time as your needs evolve.

We hope you enjoyed reading through some of the major releases we've had in 2021 and that you've discovered some new features that you'll start using today. We are building api.video for you and with you: your ideas and feedback are essential to us. Let us know which new features you'd love to see us add in 2022 either in chat or by posting in our community forum.

On behalf of the whole api.video team we would like to thank our amazing community for all the feedback and support over this past year. We wish you all a wonderful festive period and a very happy New Year! ✨

One more thing!

We couldn't end this review without a gift 🙂

You might have videos on your computer that you want to upload during your implementation, or you might need to iterate and quickly share different versions of your content without having to open & close WeTransfer again and again.

Do you remember the first time you used Dropbox and how magical it was to sync a local folder with them?

We're thrilled to announce the Windows and macOS clients!

• Download the app, pick a local folder to sync, and add your API Key.
• Drag and drop videos to the folder.
• Voilà! The sharing links to your transcoded videos are ready to be use