kallasoft

Netflix released it’s long-awaited developer API yesterday (JavaScript, REST) and to a lot of people’s surprise, was quite a bit more open-ended than expected:

We’re pleased to announce the availability of the Netflix API. The team has been hard at work on this and we’re glad we can finally let people see what we’ve built. The Netflix API allows access to data for over 100,000 movie and TV episode titles on DVD as well Netflix account access on a member’s behalf. The Netflix API gives developers the ability to create new and novel applications using Netflix data for Netflix members or movie fans in general. This API is free to developers and commercial uses are allowed.

Including things like playback and media-player component support, in addition to full Read/Write access to account information and queues. Netflix has also said they want to fully support a commercial application development model for things like iPhone/Android apps as well as Facebook books.

For the developers out there, the new API uses OAuth for authentication (like SmugMug’s API, Google’s APIs and most everybody else now) and a good place to start with it is over at the Netflix API Blog.

The first thing you’ll want to do is sign up for a Developer Account and get your application key. From there it looks like Netflix will furnish developers with free test accounts to query/work against.

Be sure to check out the Documentation for the API and Resources section for OAuth examples and code snippets.