Zoom introduces new SDK to help developers tap into video services
One clear sign of a maturing platform is when the company exposes the services it uses for its own tools to other developers. Zoom has been doing that for some time introducing Zoom Apps last year and the Marketplace to distribute and sell these apps. Today, the company introduced a new SDK (software development kit) to help developers embed Zoom video services inside another application.
Our Video SDK enables developers to leverage Zoom's industry-leading HD video, audio, and interactive features to build video-based applications and desktop experiences with native user interfaces," Zoom's Natalie Mullin wrote in a blog post announcing the new SDK.
If you want to include video in your app, you could try and code it yourself, or you could simply take advantage of Zoom's expertise in this area and use the SDK to add video to the application and save a lot of time and effort.
The company envisions applications developers embedding video in social, gaming or retail applications where including video could enhance the user experience. For example, a shop owner could show different outfits to an online shopper in a live video feed, and discuss their tastes in real time.
Zoom CTO Brendan Ittelson said the SDK is actually part of a broader set of services designed to help developers take advantage of all the developer tooling that the company has been developing in recent years. As part of that push, the company is also announcing a central developer portal.
We want to be able to have a single point where developers can go to to learn about all of the tools and resources that are available for them in the Zoom platform for their work in development, so we're launching developer.zoom.us as that central hub for all developer resources," Ittelson told me.
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In addition, the company said that it wanted to give developers more data about how people are using the Zoom features in their applications, so they will be providing a new analytics dashboard with usage statistics.
We are adding additional tools and actually providing developers with analytic dashboards. So folks that have developed apps for the Zoom ecosystem are able to see information about the usage of those apps across the platform," Ittelson said.
He believes these tools combined with the new video SDK and existing set of tools will provide developers with a variety of options for building Zoom functionality into their applications, or embedding their application into Zoom as they see fit.