Overview: Platform APIs

Introduction

The Brightcove platform APIs are RESTful APIs that allow you to get and send data to various parts of the Brightcove platform. Some examples of use include:

• Ingesting videos into Video Cloud
• Managing videos on Video Cloud
• Creating custom analytics reports for a Video Cloud account
• Creating and managing Brightcove players
• Creating Brightcove Live jobs for live streaming
• Creating transcoding jobs for videos in Zencoder

RESTful APIs

If you are not familiar with RESTful APIs, they have some common characteristics:

• Requests are made by sending an HTTP request, using different methods such as GET, POST, PATCH, and DELETE, depending on the kind of operation performed.
• The response is usually in the form of a JSON string, which any programming language can parse into native data types.

The beauty of REST is that RESTful APIs are not dependent on any particular programming language. As long as you can make HTTP requests and parse JSON responses, the API does not care what language you are using.

CORS

One thing you do need to be aware of is that most of the Brightcove APIs are not CORS enabled. You can read the linked document for a full explanation, but the upshot is that API requests in almost all cases cannot be made from a web client (a web app, for instance).

It is still possible to use web interfaces with the APIs by routing the API requests through a server-side proxy, as we do in many of the sample apps on this site, and explain in Using the REST APIs.

You can make requests from your own internet-connected computer using tools like cURL, Postman, or Insomnia

Authentication

Authentication for most platform APIs is via a temporary OAuth2 access token. A few APIs use a permanent api key or policy key instead. See the documentation on the individual APIs for details.

Video Cloud APIs

Brightcove Player (stand-alone) APIs

Brightcove Live API

Zencoder API