Video distribution services and the pain of accessing statistics

When you distribute your videos across different video distribution platforms, you try to keep up with all the comments or views your videos receive.

Not all platforms provide a nice Webservice / API, allowing to aggregate all of those statistics in one place. I do not understand why some services distribute the standard video information via RSS, but leave the views and comment count out of the equation.

In the past weeks I have been building a complete stats package for portalZINE TV, pulling in all required data.

Here is how I accessed each of the services. I added a plus for those that are prepared to share the stats data, a minus for those that made me work a bit more :)

• + Blip.TV (XML via RSS)
• – Mogulus (PHP / Curl)
• + DailyMotion (XML / RSS / multiple pages)
• + Youtube (XML / RSS or Youtube API)
• + Vimeo (XML / Simple API)
• + Metacafe (XML / RSS)
• – Sevenload (PHP / Curl )
• – MyVideo (XML / Rest API)
• + Revver (XML / XML-RPC)
• + MySpace (XML / Open Social API)
• – Yahoo (PHP / RSS / Curl)
• – Google (PHP / Curl )
• – Viddler (PHP / Curl / multiple pages)
• + Veoh  (XML / Rest Api)

I am currently optimizing the daily updates, so that not all calls are done at the same time. Some of the services will be deactivated, if nothing notable really happens there. In my case shows are in German, so not all services provide the right viewership. This current exercise really allows me to decide which services are important upload hubs.

Really hope that APIs are getting more common among those services.

Cheers
Alexander