We want to make live video ubiquitous across the Web. We know there are dozens of use cases that live video would be perfect for: customer support, pay per view entertainment, remote education, collaborative gaming…the list is expanding every day. Unfortunately we can’t build all of them, there are just too many.

Instead, we want to let all of you build these applications. We know how hard it is to do, so instead of asking each of you to pay for servers and bandwidth, we just released our open, free API to the public and I am extremely excited to be the first to tell you about it. That’s not all though, we’re also open sourcing some of the apps we’ve written to show off what you can do.

The API
The API itself comes in two main pieces, REST and Flash. In short, we’ve giving away access to several pieces of our technology and infrastructure. The REST API was built to provide information about already existing Justin.tv data and broadcasts. The Flash API includes the live player and the broadcaster, each of which are fully customizable in appearance and behavior. Finally, our chat, along with our social chat channels, is available as well.

The possibilities for live video applications are really only limited by your imagination. Want to create a custom-skinned player? You can do it. Integrate with your own service’s existing profile and identity system? No problem. Think you can make a great live video search engine, if only you had access to the stream data? Now you have it. We’re hoping to see all these applications, along with the ones mentioned above, and more.

The apps
We’ve been using the API ourselves for a couple of weeks and we’ve made a few applications to show what you can do. One you might recognize is Camtweet, the Twitter-integrated app we showed off at TechCrunch’s Real Time Stream event a few weeks ago. Camtweet was actually built in just a few hours (thanks, Emmett) using an early version of our API. Today Camtweet is not only open for you to use, but also open sourced. You can find the code here to see how it works and even create your own Camtweet. Take it, play with it, change it, do whatever you like. We’re giving it away for free.

We hope you like some of the apps we’ve made, and maybe even use one or two. Personally, I’m really enjoying Kevin B’s Mac OSX dashboard widget.

We’re not satisfied yet though, so we’re also going to open source a few more apps to help get you started. Check out the applications gallery on our API wiki for info on those.

Thanks to the entire Justin.tv team that made this happen.