A free and open TV series, Movie and Podcast data API supporting
JSON and msgpack with and without gzip
Web hooks, authentication-free, and with changes stream pointer which one can easily tail, monitoring recent changes.
Modern Formats
JSON and Msgpack are modern, light-on-the-wire
data interchange languages supported on almost every
platform.
Gzipped or not, we offer both, it's your choice, both formats are fairly compact anyway, but every little helps.
Dont' call us..
Web-hooks mean we'll tell you when there's something new,
choose between the fire garden hose of
changes, or just areas of the data set you are interested in.
The web-hooks driver will notify you if we can't reach your application and we'll guarantee you never miss a push notification.
International
We know that i18n isn't a feature one can bolt on later.
By default we treat all locales equally, it's rare that a piece of media has a canonical name in one specific language.
All API requests can be filtered to exclude languages which aren't relevant to one's application.
Join the beta list
We're currently in private beta, which is code for not ready yet, but we're working on it.
If you'd like to be amongst the first to get access to the API, to share feedback, and test it to death, please drop your name into the hat.
Where does the data come from?
OpenMedia.io collects data from human, and machine readable sources, as well as having invited (so far, unsuccessfully) the broadcasters and studios to contribute their data.
What's in it for you?
The satisfaction of building something that solves a lot of problems.
How else should one discover that a certain show has been cancelled, or has returned from haitus, or that a new episode has aired? How can we assimilate that information in an easy to access way, without locking the data up in propriatary formats, and difficult to use databases, data wants to be free. Data that's locked inside of obtuse APIs isn't free enough.
Electronic program guides, and databases focused on broadcast media are losing relevance.
How open is open?
There's one condition in licensing the data, which is that the data may not be used to offer competing or similar service, commercially or otherwise.
We know that it's in the blood of engineers and developers to succumb to not invented here syndrome and we'd like to curb that and focus development on a flexible database that can support true-to-life representations of many forms of media.
What kinds of media?
Currently we're focused highly on broadcast television series.
On the shortlist to build in the short term are Podcasts, Web-TV series, YouTube channels and of course Movies.
The only thing standing in the way of supporting a new media class is settling on a data format which represents the media in an accurate way; we're pretty sure that can be done without massive arguments, headaches and committees.
Is it legal?
Our lawyers seem fairly confident that we can collect any information and provide it in alternate formats without violating any rights that others may hold on the data.
We have the right to ensure that our data may not be re-used in certain ways, as we have added value to otherwise difficult to extract and process data, this is essentially the same mechanism that allows google to own the search results, whilst the site owners retain the rights to the content itself. Google own the mechanism, the rights holders own the rights.
It's in the hands of individual content providers if they wish to sever our access, we respect robots.txt and only make use of
public APIs. Our bot's user-agent string is fixed, and contains a a link to this page.