Facebook launches new video embed API and Apple Watch/TV SDK

Facebook has already provided a lot of useful tools for developers, and today, the company released a new video embedding API and SDK for Apple Watch / Apple TV. This API can bring Facebook-style features to videos embedded in websites. Developers can choose whether to play automatically, and it also provides the common playback status bar and play/pause buttons.

Videos created through this API can also be interactive.

The example Facebook provides is a Selena Gomez video (on the Facebook Developers site), where users can view a tour log through a slide-out menu or subscribe to a newsletter for more information.

The two newly added Parse SDKs are for Apple Watch and Apple TV respectively. The open source community can use this to speed up the launch process, but its core concept still sounds very familiar:

Our primary goal was to create a familiar software development kit similar to the existing iOS or OS X SDK, while making it easier than ever to create native apps for tvOS and watchOS 2.

Of course, one issue the Facebook team faced was local storage on tvOS (which was not easy to implement on Apple TV), and they had to refactor local data persistence on the iOS SDK. Facebook also introduced a new login flow for Apple TV, which allows users to log in to the app through an ad hoc solution.

The new Apple Watch SDK is designed specifically for watchOS 2, which is an iteration of the watchOS 1 SDK. Now, developers can create native apps for Apple Watch, but Facebook did not disclose whether the SDK supports Custom Complications.