I worked with Leonardo Lanzinger on a new project to aggregate live videos from multiple services in one interface. I worked on the API, and he worked on the client side. We added three services already: Youtube, Twitch and Periscope. Youtube and Twitch were pretty straightforward; with their APIs supporting search requests. For Persicope, I had to work on multiple approaches. Periscope was bought by and integrated into twitter, so I tried to use the Twitter search API with “filter:periscope” in the search query. In normal circumstances, this would have worked. Twitter has a shitty search API (sorry, Twitter), which is “not meant to be an exhaustive source of Tweets“, and it returns search results in an arbitrary response time (from 5 to > 30 seconds). Periscope is not much better, as it does not even have a search API. I decided to go with scrapping the periscope search page (https://www.periscope.tv/search?q=QUERY). It was simple, the results of the search is sent in a div component with an attribute called “data-store” which has all the results in url-safe JSON format. I decoded it, and parsed the result, and used it to return the search result.
We are planning to add more platforms as they become accessible, mainly targeting Facebook live service. You can check the project page here: https://reemote.herokuapp.com
Engineering The Design 