API of the Week: Vidyo APIs Add Value All Around Us

If you want your company to have a tremendous valuation, make it an Nic Reid Headshot.jpgintegral part of a platform which allows others to benefit financially from effectively selling your products and services. Tens of thousands of resellers promote Microsoft software, hundreds of thousands develop software for iOS, Salesforce has a great partner ecosystem of app builders and so on. There are a few ways of becoming the platform company… From the inside out or the outside in.

In other words, once iPhones got in the hands of millions of people, the apps added value to the platform and by default, Apple, who is on the inside. Google Maps on the other hand has provided a wonderful API which allows companies to display their location on an interactive map with ease and elegance. That’s outside-in.

The reason this latter approach is so powerful is it allows any company to add so much value to their applications that the growth of the API almost becomes contagious. How many websites for example don’t have Google Maps showing up on their “Contact Us” page?

In the video space, Vidyo is becoming that value-added company making APIs which improve products in virtually any and every market you can think of. They are a great example of how any company can turn their core competency into a value-added service through the implementation of intelligent API calls.

To learn more, I interviewed Nic Reid, Senior Vice President of Product Management, a passionate product evangelist. This post is being done in in conjunction with the All About The API conference to be held this July in Las Vegas where Nik will be on hand to discuss how intelligently adding video to your application or service can boost the value of whatever products and services you offer.

What APIs are you making available?

We are launching a new simple set of APIs which allow application developers to do the following things:

  1. Create and connect to a virtual conference space with a unique identifier, which can be joined by many attendees using any modern device – mobile, desktop and/or room system.
  2. Select which peripherals to use; allow an end-user to choose between cameras, microphones and/or speakers connected to their computer.
  3. Quickly see what video streams are available and show as many as the endpoint hardware can handle simultaneously.
  4. Pick from a set of pre-defined dynamic video layouts, or custom-control how individual video streams appear to the end user.

How do they benefit others?

High quality video collaboration is extremely difficult to do well, particularly on battery and CPU-constrained mobile devices. Because video pushes the capabilities of devices and networks, there are a myriad of firmware, USB peripheral, network resilience tuning, firewall traversal insights which we’ve built into our core technology to make the experience great.

Over the last ten years Vidyo has worked hard to make our solution fit well in everything from 4K room systems through mobiles and modest laptop machines to embedded systems like ATMs and electronic hospital ICU platforms.

With our new APIs, we are making it possible for any developer (not just video experts) to be able to add the highest quality video collaboration functionality to their application or workflow, without having to worry about any of the details of how it’s done under the covers.

What new business opportunities will there be for other companies?

We are excited to see what high-value services global companies will be able to build on top of our video collaboration capabilities. We are certain there are great use cases in healthcare, financial services, defense, resources, emergency services, insurance and even transportation sectors which can be massively streamlined by the addition of high quality video collaboration. There are endless possibilities when access and consumption of our APIs is simplified through the PaaS offering. By removing friction we’re accelerating ways to go to market and use Vidyo.

Why should other organizations become part of your corporate ecosystem?

  1. Our proven technology – 10 years of focus, engineering and testing in this space
  2. Our intellectual property – Vidyo has 117 patents around video collaboration
  3. Our commitment to quality & security – We provide the highest resolution of any hosted platform, security is a key focus for all of our platform development.
  4. Platform Neutrality – we’re committed to providing great quality on all of our supported platforms. 
  5. Our ability to scale to millions of simultaneous connections means fewer worries if application uptake explodes.

Being part of the Vidyo ecosystem is all about getting access to Vidyo sales resources and to other ecosystem partners.  The ecosystem brings like-minded partners together to foster synergies and create value.

Also as part of the community, ecosystem partners have marketing opportunities on the Solutions Marketplace. The Marketplace helps partners drive awareness of their solutions and generate leads.

What feedback have you had on your APIs so far?

We look forward to customer feedback as the PaaS offering is launched.

How do you market your API’s?

  • Web & Social Media
  • Hackathons 
  • Direct Sales
  • Business development activities with technology partners

Who is the “customer” for API’s?

Any developer who wants to add video collaboration to their application or workflow – whether they are starting from scratch, or have an existing application.  Developers working in organizations the size of startups to the largest enterprises can benefit from our platform.

    Leave Your Comment


     

    Loading
    Share via
    Copy link
    Powered by Social Snap