Accelerate your broadpeak.io video and audio streaming with Postman

This is a guest post written by Mathias Guile, VP cloud platform at broadpeak.io.

broadpeak.io is a video API-based platform that offers content providers, pay-TV operators, and OTT service providers an easy, fast, and reliable way to deliver advanced streaming quality to their subscribers. broadpeak adapts streams in real time so viewers see personalized feeds.

At broadpeak, we continue to work every day to facilitate the adoption of our APIs. The latest news to help better our user experience is that you can now easily interact with our APIs via our official broadpeak.io workspace in the Postman Public API Network.

This is an exciting new step because Postman is great for quickly validating various scenarios involving broadpeak.io APIs. Since learning how to use a third-party API can be time-consuming, visual API development tools like Postman make the learning journey much more accessible!

By simply forking some of our collections and adding them to your workspace directly, you can now experience the following benefits:

•       Visually explore and interact with broadpeak.io’s API without writing code.
•       Facilitate follow-up on API modifications.
•       Avoid making manual API requests or useless repeated requests for multiple team members.
•       Access demo “recipes” to rapidly test the technology and some specific use cases.
•       Easily share and modify collections with your colleagues and partners.
•       Contribute and propose through pull requests to enrich broadpeak.io collections.

Postman is complementary to broadpeak.io’s API Reference hosted on our Knowledge Center. It can do similar things to let you test some of our API calls but makes it easier if you prefer to do it on your desktop. It also helps to use our “recipes” to quickly create demos (see the description of the collections below) and let them adapt to your case.

broadpeak.io Postman Collections

You will quickly notice in the broadpeak.io workspace that we make several collections available:

We’ve made available our complete suite of REST API and what we call “recipes” (for example, to show you how to create virtual channels easily in HLS or DASH) that are a chain of requests to demonstrate a scenario.

In this blog post, we will take a generic approach and show you the basics of using one of our collections.

How to get started

Pre-requisites

Please note that you need to have created your account on both Postman and broadpeak.io before starting:

•       Create a free account with Postman
•       Create a free broadpeak.io account

Step 1. Add a broadpeak.io collection to your account by forking it to your workspace

First, you must get access to and fork our collections from the Postman Public API Network.

You can see all of our Postman Collections here in our broadpeak.io documentation portal.

Once you click one of the Run in Postman buttons for a collection, a new tab will open prompting you to select the orange Fork Collection.

You need to select the collection, click on More actions and Create a fork button:

Next, you will be asked to create a name for your forked collection—this is to confirm that you are working on a duplicate and not the original collection. You’ll also have to select which of your existing Postman workspaces you want to copy or fork this collection into. Keep in mind that if you fork this collection into a public collection, it will technically be viewable by other people. In that context, we recommend having your fork in a private collection, as you will use the API token you want to keep for yourself.

Step 2. Add your API key as collection variables

You are almost ready to make API requests for broadpeak.io in Postman with minimal setup. One last detail you need to configure before start working is your authentication.

Indeed, when you add the collection to your Postman instance, you still need to add your API_TOKEN in the variable to authenticate you on our API gateway.

To add your key to the catalog, click on it and look for Variables. You must add your API Key in the API_TOKEN variable under Current Value:

Once you’ve added your credential as variables, you will be ready to make requests to the broadpeak.io API collection!

Step 3. Select a call, add your values, send your request, and review your response

The next step would be to send calls and interact with our platform.

First, select the endpoint you want to target to build your request:

We will use the broadpeak.io API > Live Sources > Create live source endpoint for this example.

The next step will have you navigate to the Params tab to start filling in the parameters of your request.

After everything is set up in your request, you can click the Send button. If successful, you should receive the following payload:

  {

   “name”: “ABC”,

  “description”: “A description of the source”,

  “url”: “https://example/media/content.m3u8”,

  “backupIp”: “9.9.9.9”,

  “id”: 42

}

Congratulations, you have sent your first API request to broadpeak.io using Postman!

Step 4. Create your chain of requests

When comfortable with Postman, you can build your recipes to create your demos/integrations. It consists of chaining API calls to achieve a series of actions.

Look at the following examples in our workspace for some inspiration:

• How to create virtual channels easily in HLS
• How to create virtual channels easily in DASH

Please do not hesitate to share your recipes with us! We will happily promote them in our public workspace and present them to our wider community.

We created our Postman Collection because we believe it will facilitate greater familiarization and interaction with our APIs and products.

We’d love to know whether this helps you out. You can give us your feedback by clicking on the thumb up (or down) button at the bottom of the broadpeak.io documentation page for our Postman Collections.

And, of course, you can always reach out by leaving a comment at the end of this blog post, by direct message/reply on Twitter, or by email.