Overcoming the Lack of a Hulu API
Today I’m building a web app that provides a live listing of all available Criterion films. There are two places (mainly) that stream these movies: Netflix and Hulu.
Doing searches against Netflix is very easy, thanks to their incredible openness and the APIs they make available. I specifically use their OData provider—all I have to do is structure a URL which contains a query. I wrote the function to do this search in under 5 minutes!
Querying Hulu is, however, much more difficult. They don’t have any sort of official API, unfortunately. After some digging, though, I found out that they support oEmbed. I’d never heard of oEmbed, but it is meant to convey the metadata about any particular item offered on a site. I eventually found an old Hulu blog post from 2008, announcing oEmbed support.
