Table of Contents
The Yahoo! Live REST Web Services provide programmatic access to Yahoo! Live data and functionality.
All access to the Yahoo! Live REST API will be at the following URL root: http://live.yahooapis.com/v1/. So if we tell you to use "/broadcasts" to get the list of broadcasts, that really means http://live.yahooapis.com/v1/broadcasts
Throughout this document, the term "permalink" will be repeatedly
used. A permalink is the string which identifies a
person's channel. When you created your Yahoo! Live channel, you were
asked to input what URL you would like to use. The name you picked is your
channel's permalink. When displayed as
PERMALINK in a URI, you are meant to replace
that with the permalink of the channel you wish to query for. For example,
for the "/channel/PERMALINK/viewers"
collection, a valid query could be http://live.yahooapis.com/v1/channel/freakshow/viewers
Our Web Services are organized as resources and collections, following REST patterns. What are resources and collections, you ask?
A resource identifies an object or piece of data (commonly referred to as "nouns" in REST terminology). For example, your Yahoo! Live channel is a resource and there exists a unique URI to retrieve it.
A collection is just a list of resources. Easy, right? For example, if you request the top 10 broadcasts, that list of broadcasts is a collection
Whether you are querying for a resource or a collection, some parameters can always be sent. The following query parameters are accepted, when appropriate.
format: XML or JSON; default is XML
start: collections only, specifies the start point of a collection; default is 1. This parameter allows you to specify which item of the collection to return first. In other words, by sending start=10 the collection will not return the first 9 resources and instead begin with the 10th.
count: collections only, specifies the number of resources to return from a collection; default is 10. Unless otherwise stated, collections return 10 resources. If you need to fetch more resources at a time, set this to a higher value.
callback: JSON requests only, defines a Javascript function to be called when the request returns, with the JSON object passed in as a single parameter. More information about this mechanism is available at http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.html#callbackparam