AOL has launched an initiative that opens its video search platform to third-party developers and content owners.
Continuing its commitment to provide developers with open access to its popular services, AOL of late announced an initiative that opens the platform for its industry-leading AOL Video Search engine to third-party developers and video content owners.

Open Platform enables developers to integrate AOL Video Search results into third-party web sites, making it easier for content owners to submit video feeds in Real-Tim to AOL Video Search Index.

Inviting Videographers
The company is announcing a program to let external developers build applications based on its video search engines, a step AOL has taken for other of its online services, like its AOL Instant Messaging platform (AIM).

The Time Warner subsidiary released a set of APIs, or (application program interfaces), for building video search-driven applications, as well as implemented a system for video content owners to submit feeds to the AOL Video Search Index through new AOL Director Accounts. The APIs offer a number of functions, including advanced keyword search, tagging, rating, RSS and support for sharing videos via blogs and social networks.

The purpose is to build as large an index as possible for AOL users looking for video content throughout the Web, said Timothy Tuttle, AOL Video's vice president.

"With more and more video content coming online each day, we believe video search will become increasingly important as a way for consumers to find all of the rich content on the Web - from high quality branded content to the most popular viral videos from across the web," said Kevin Conroy, Executive Vice President, AOL. "In an effort to help deliver the best results for the user, we are opening our platform and enabling developers to integrate video search results into their websites so that they can in turn offer their users easy access to the best search engine for finding video on the Web."

Through a set of open AOL Video Search APIs, which are available in both REST and AJAX, developers can now build innovative video search-driven applications that access AOL's extensive index containing millions of videos from across the Web. Other functionality available through the new AOL Video Search APIs includes:

• Advanced keyword searching as well as video browsing by category, channel, tag or user.
• Advanced sorting and filtering capabilities for video search results.
• Rich support for user ratings, tagging, favorites, etc.
• Integrated support for easy user sharing on social networking sites, blogs, etc
• Full RSS support to enable easy syndication of video search results.
• Easy self-service online sign-up.

The new AOL Video Search APIs offer developers an unprecedented set of tools and functionality for integrating our powerful video search technology into their websites, said Tuttle. "We believe developers will find our video search APIs to be more versatile and easier to use than other video search APIs available today."

Integrating Video Sites
AOL has a variety of video sites and video search sites, including AOL Video, UnCut, Truveo, and Singingfish. However, AOL is creating an integrated platform for all of them, and the first program to take advantage of it is this new developer initiative, Tuttle said.

For content owners looking to broaden the distribution of their video content, the AOL Director Account program is a free, first-of-its-kind offering for site owners and content publishers to submit feeds to AOL Video Search. Unlike other video search engines, this fully self-service online sign-up and feed management system enables users to make their self-hosted videos easily searchable across the AOL Video Search network within minutes of being submitted. Through its network of third-party syndication partners and across the AOL websites, the AOL Video Search network has greater reach than any other video search engine, providing an ideal platform for content owners to syndicate their video and drive traffic to their own Web destinations.

The goal for the APIs is different than the one that AOL had in mind when it opened up a number of its other applications to developers--notably its instant-messaging client AIM and IP telephony service AIM Phoneline. The AIM and AIM Phoneline toolkits were designed to enable modifications to the existing software, whereas the purpose of the new video-search APIs is to spread its video search engine to sites other than AOL.

AOL's video search engine is an access point for largely third-party video such as clips from the BBC and CNN. It should not be confused with AOL Video, which is a portal for viewing "channels" of online video--TV shows and movies--for a price.

In related news, AOL also announced the launch of AOL Video for the Intel Viiv platform. With this new service, thousands of original, licensed and distributed content in the AOL Video library can be viewed by consumers from a "10-foot" living room TV viewing experience via Intel Viiv-enabled PCs.

For submitting video feeds, AOL has set up a self-service online sign-up and feed management system. The AOL Director Account program is available at no charge.

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