[Future of Television] APIs + CoverPop
The following is our homework submission for the Future of Television blog:
This week’s blog post assignment has us focusing on APIs and how they relate to the television watching experience. In doing some last minute research (“we had to do a blog post this week, too?!?”), Team Melo is happy to share some thoughts on the topic. A quick Google search netted this article which highlights some of the better APIs out there.
We were then happy to come across CoverPop, which is based on the YouTube API which was highlighted in the above referenced article as one of the better (if not the best) available APIs. CoverPop takes images from the most popular YouTube videos of particular genres and literally brings them all together in a digital collage. A click on the image will explode the image larger on the screen, and double click will bring the user to the actual video on YouTube.
This interface speaks to traditional methods of navigating through different physical photos (like back in the old days) and finding some that catch your eye. As a lean-forward digital experience this is certainly different and worthy of exploring, especially in light of upcoming innovation such as surface computing
Also on that vein, is an interesting mobile site by some guy named Tom Robinson that leverages mobile phone touch screen interfaces and the same kind of navigation shown in CoverPop. Check it out on your iPhone or Android.