WebProNews

Netflix has opened its API to third party developers to use within their own applications, and has even authorized commercial use of it. The company is supplying Javascript, REST programming, and Atom feed API components. The API can be used in the following capacities:

- Performing searches of movies, TV series, cast members, and directors

- Retrieving catalog titles, including details about the title such as name, box art, director, cast, etc.

- Determining the subscriber's relationship to a specific title, e.g, in queue, saved, available on DVD, etc.

- Managing and displaying queues for users

- Providing conveniences such as auto-completion of partial search terms typed by a user.

- Displaying a user's ratings and reviews.

- Including functional Add and Play buttons in your web application.

Some have noted that developers are very likely to offer apps for the iPhone and Google Phone utilizing the Netflix API, letting users easily manipulate their queues while on the go. Netflix shares an example for potential use of the API, using the catalog/title resource to search through the catalog and display results within an application. They offered the following image to highlight this:

In other Netflix-related news, the company signed a deal with premium channel Starz in which it will contribute 2,500 movies, television shows and concerts to watch online through Netflix. This is pretty huge for the online viewing feature of Netflix, because so far its biggest knock has been the size of the catalog, particularly when compared with the entire DVD catalog of the company.

It also further highlights the online video revolution, and the potential for set-top boxes to move further into the norm. Like I said yesterday, we're seeing strides in this department, nearly every day. This is only the latest example. The API release will only contribute to the integration of on demand online video when combined with Netflix's streaming catalog which is provided to users via a separate queue.