Using api.video with the Jamstack

The Jamstack

One of the most popular web development practices in recent years has been the Jamstack. With a goal of a better (and simpler) developer experience, and a faster, more scalable website. Can all of these things truly happen at the same time?

Jamstack is now it’s own name, but it once was an acronym describing the JAM stack: JavaScript, APIs and prebuilt Markup. Since all of the HTML is prebuilt - delivery is fast. Personalizations and updates can be made with the APIs and the JavaScript.

Api.video is the perfect addition to your Jamstack build, allowing for videos to easily integrated into your application using our APIs and integrated video player.

The core principles of Jamstack

According to the Jamstack.org, the core principles of Jamstack are pre-rendering and decoupling.

Pre-rendering

To generate the markup which represents a view in advance of when it is required. This happens during a build rather than on-demand so that web servers do not need to perform this activity for each request received.

When your videos are hosted at api.video, you’ll receive a unique url for each video that includes a video player. Adding the video into your site requires just adding the player url (or the included iframe url) to your site. No player integration or development development is required, it just works!

You can customize your player through the API to match the colour scheme and feel of your site, but we'll handle creating the your player for you.

Already have a player?

If you already have a video player integrated, there is still no development work. You can simply insert the HLS url from our API (it is the streaming manifest file) into your existing player (here's a tutorial). Easy, plug and play!

Decoupling

Decoupling is the process of creating a clean separation between systems or services. By decoupling the services needed to operate a site, each component part can become easier to reason about, can be independently swapped out or upgraded, and can be designated the purview of dedicated specialists either within an organization, or as a third party.

Video (and especially responsive streaming video) is a nontrivial service to add to your website or application. The great thing about decoupling is that swapping in a 3rd party service is easier to do. Rather than having to ‘build it yourself’, you can grab the pieces of the puzzle you need from 3rd party sources. Of course, you can do it, but in addition to video ingestion, transcoding and encoding, you also have to worry about hosting (video files are big!) and ensuring fast delivery to your end users. With api.video, you don’t have to worry about building a CDN and video delivery network for worldwide distribution. Finally - with our integrated player, you can just add the url to your page, and be done with it. No other 3rd party API provides everything you need from upload to playback. You can mix and match from other providers, but why not just use the 'all in one' approach?

Conclusion

So, why would you use api.video for your Jamstack application? With our APIs, you can easily add video upload tools, so your users can add videos into your system. Once the video is added, you can simply take the created videoId and display the video on the appropriate pages by retrieving the player URL from our API. All of the issues of video logistics are lifted from your development team, leaving the experts at api.video to create and optimize the video streaming pipeline. Now you can focus on the core development tasks of your business. Sign up now and see for yourself how easy it is to use api.video.