Getting Counts of Videos and Playlists

This topic describes how to get the number of videos or playlists in an account using the CMS API.

Introduction

It's sometimes useful to get a count of videos or playlists in your account, or how many videos have been added in the past month or year. You can easily get these kinds of counts using the /counts/ endpoint for the CMS API.

Authentication

Requests to the CMS API require an authorization header which contain your access tokens. For details on how to obtain client credentials and use them to retrieve access tokens, see the Brightcove OAuth Overview.

Get video counts

To get a count of videos, make a GET request to:

    https://cms.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/counts/videos

The response will look like this:

    {
      "count": 4999
    }

What makes the video counts endpoint so powerful is that you also append a search parameter to the request. This allows you to get a count of whatever videos the search would return. Because the search parameter is so flexible, this allows you to get a count of many things, such as:

  • the number of videos that have a particular tag or a specific value for a custom field
  • the number of videos added in the last year (or month, or week, etc.)
  • the number of videos that are currently playable
  • the number of videos scheduled for release next week

Get playlists count

You can also get a count of playlists in your account by making a GET request to:

    https://cms.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/counts/playlists

The response has the same format as the one for video counts.

You can also use the search parameter in playlist count requests. So, for example, you could find out how many manual playlists are in the account by appending q=type:EXPLICIT to the request.

In addition, you can get the count of videos in any manual or smart playlists by making your GET request to:

    https://cms.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/counts/playlists/playlist_id/videos