2021: Wrapping up a great Q1 at api.video

We’re wrapping up a huge Q1 at api.video!

This is the perfect moment for a review of what happened these last weeks and what our next milestones are. :)

First: people! Because nothing reflects more on the product and ‘what’s next’ than the people contributing to it!

The team has grown to 26 people in Q1, I’m so happy to have welcomed:

• Erikka (🤝 Developer Relations), Joelle (📈 Growth Product), Julie (🎨 Design) and Thomas (🛠 Full-stack Developer) in the Growth team
• Olivier (🔄 Head of Ecosystem) in the Ecosystem Team
• JB (⛓ Head of core) in the Core Team

and 5 more to be announced these next weeks :)

Remote from day 1, it’s awesome to have (in just 6 months) great multi-cultural talents from the US, Italy, UK, France, Australia, China and Russia!

Every team will keep hiring this quarter, don't miss our offers here (or drop us an email at hello@api.video)!

We have released many new features, driven by our roadmap and nurtured by your requests (please keep adding some: meeting your needs is our #1 priority!:

• Download a high quality MP4 from go.api.video without enabling the MP4 support property. - Previously, if you downloaded an MP4, you had to do so with the MP4 support property enabled. This was a problem if you didn’t want your end users to be able to download a video. Now, you can download a video through the dashboard no matter the property setting, but the setting still applies for your users.
• Create a private live stream. - Everyone’s (yes, really! everyone!) been asking for private live streams and we are proud to announce you can now create them! Just like with private videos, you use a one-time token that a user can use to access a video. This prevents sharing. The token makes the video accessible to a user one time for one web session.
• Our first webhook, which notifies you whenever a new video is created in api.video. - We’re also happy to announce that api.video now offers webhooks. What’s currently available is a webhook that notifies you whenever a new video is created. Over time, we’ll add additional triggers. Let us know what you think and what you’d like to see in the future!

Adding New Developer Tools

You already know our mission: help you make online videos available worldwide as quickly as possible. That means helping you stay focused on your use case without having to spend months frankensteining together a mashup of services (like separate transcoding, storage, CDN, and database solutions).

But we wouldn’t be a best in class API without providing you shortcuts to integrate api.video! To make api.video easier to use, we’ve taken the time to build out new tools and improve upon existing ones. We now provide:

• Two new SDKs: one for Java and one for Golang - Our new SDKs are auto-generated, meaning we’ll be able to keep them up-to-date with the latest changes to our API much more easily. We’ve rolled out Java and Golang, with plans to roll out additional SDKs for React, Python, and more. As part of the SDK overhaul, we fixed the SDK player so that you can now start a new video when another video finishes playing without needing to create a new player instance. If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see in our SDKs, or what kind of SDK you want, please let us know, we love feedback!
• Three stand alone modules for analytics tracking: generic, video.js, and hls.js - We added the stand alone modules for analytics for developers who don’t want to use our player. You can track 3rd party players in detail with these.
• Survey about no-code platforms to see which they you would want and what features - For no-code, we wanted to know what platforms are most popular, and which our community would like to see, you can contribute here!

Improving Reliability, Scalability, and Diagnostics

This quarter we learned a lot about site reliability, scalability, and the importance of diagnostic tools for everything we build. The result was we launched our own EDGE Infrastructure!

At api.video we deeply believe that the Internet has been for text, not video, and we are all sick of latency, buffering and bad quality when we want to enjoy video content. To drastically improve the whole online video experience, great code is not enough without an infrastructure designed specifically for video.

We plan to release our new infrastructure to the EU region in just a few weeks and the US before the end of Q2. We can’t wait to help all of you benefit from this major improvement :)

Last but not least:

via GIPHY

Usages have never been so intense, all metrics — new videos uploaded, transcoded, and delivered — grew three digits this quarter!

It’s fantastic to chat with all of you on a daily basis to discover your use cases, understand your needs and roll up our sleeves to help you succeed!

Let’s pursue this discussion on the community forum or drop me a line cmontet@api.video!