api.video gives developers the building blocks to put video inside their own product. Upload a file, and it gets encoded, stored, delivered through a CDN and played in an embeddable player. The same API handles live streaming, analytics, and AI transcription and summaries.
It's aimed at teams that build software, not at people who want a finished video portal: think a course platform, a marketplace with video listings, or a social app.
| Company | api.video, Bordeaux, France |
| Founded | 2017 by Cédric Montet, who earlier founded the video platform Libcast |
| Funding | $5.5M seed in 2020 led by Blossom Capital, $12M Series A in December 2022 led by MMC Ventures |
| Infrastructure | Runs on OVHcloud, with more than 140 delivery locations |
| Scale | More than 60,000 developers and agencies, 1 petabyte of traffic a month |
| SDKs | More than 20 clients and plugins: iOS, Android, Python, Node.js, PHP, Java and others |
For business people
The problem: adding video to a product sounds simple, until you meet encoding, formats for every device, storage, a CDN, a player, live streaming and analytics. Building that yourself takes a video team.
What api.video does: it turns all of that into a few API calls, so a product team can ship video features in days.
- Video on demand: upload, automatic encoding, hosting and playback.
- Live streaming through the same API.
- Player that you can embed or brand.
- Analytics on views and viewers.
- AI features: transcription in 33 languages, and summaries.
European by default. A French company on OVHcloud infrastructure. That's a selling point for customers who want their video data under EU rules.
Pricing
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Encoding | Free, unlimited |
| Hosting | From $0.00285 per minute of video stored |
| Delivery | From $0.0017 per minute watched |
| Transcription | $0.10 per minute, 33 languages |
| Summary | $0.10 per minute for the abstract, plus $0.05 per minute for key takeaways |
| Custom domain | €60 a month per extra domain |
A free sandbox limits videos to 30 seconds, adds a watermark and deletes content after 24 hours. Enterprise adds higher API limits, longer audit logs, isolated storage and signed SLA and DPA agreements.
Pricing per minute, not per gigabyte, makes costs easy to predict from your catalogue: minutes stored and minutes watched.
The limits: it's a developer tool. There's no portal, no user management, no search inside a video library for employees and no integrations with company systems out of the box. You build those.
For technical people
The API is REST, with your API key sent as HTTP Basic authentication. A video is an object: create it, upload the file, then use its player and delivery URLs.
# 1. Create the video object
curl -X POST https://ws.api.video/videos \
-u "$APIVIDEO_API_KEY:" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"title": "Product demo"}'
# 2. Upload the file to the videoId returned above
curl -X POST https://ws.api.video/videos/{videoId}/source \
-u "$APIVIDEO_API_KEY:" \
-F file=@demo.mp4
The video object returns an assets block with the embed code, player URL, HLS manifest, thumbnail and, if enabled, an MP4 link. Official SDKs wrap all this, including for iOS and Android, and the documentation covers each endpoint.
How it compares
| Service | Best for |
|---|---|
| api.video | Developers who want a European video API with free encoding and per-minute pricing |
| Mux | The best-known US video API, strong on analytics and data |
| Cloudflare Stream | Teams already on Cloudflare |
| Bunny Stream | The lowest-cost option, billed per gigabyte (see bunny.net ) |
Value
I work in enterprise video, at Kaltura, so I see this space from the other side. api.video sits at the developer end of the market: building blocks, clear per-minute prices, and nothing to manage for the end user. Enterprise platforms sit at the other end, with the portal, permissions, search and integrations already built. Both show where the value of video moved: storage and delivery are cheap commodities now, and the money is in what you build on top.
For my own projects, it's the kind of API I'd use to add upload and playback to a lab tool without running any video infrastructure.
Further Reading
