Power up your Sports Blog: Real-Time Basketball Highlights API aggregation guide

Basketball has come a long way from what it used to be. As one of the most popular and widely-watched global sports, there are a few ways to watch it:

• Television remains a primary platform for watching basketball games. Certain major leagues, such as the NBA and NCAA college basketball, have extensive broadcasting agreements with various networks, ensuring that fans can watch games on their TVs.

• Streaming services allow fans to watch games and their content online through platforms like ESPN+ and NBA League Pass, providing more flexibility and access to games on various devices.

• Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have become essential for real-time updates, highlights, and discussions about basketball. Fans can follow their favourite teams and players, watch short clips, and engage in discussions with others.

• Live attendance in person remains a cherished experience for fans. Major arenas and stadiums host games, offering a unique atmosphere for spectators.

With such widespread interest, there are many reasons why many sports blogs exist. Ranging from passion and expertise to fandom and community, readers often seek out blogs to find a sense of community and engage in discussions about their favourite sports and teams. There, they can also find unique perspectives and in-depth analyses that may not be readily available in mainstream media.

As a sports blog owner, one would like to cover two main points:

1. News, analysis, and insights into events and developments. There exist aggregators that can help sports blog owners by providing the most relevant insights. One can always write an article that will contribute to the proliferation of their sports blog.

2. Highlight clips, recaps, interviews, and plays. Many platforms host sports-related clips like YouTube, Twitter, etc. For sports blog owners, scouring the internet repeatedly is never fun and gets cumbersome really soon.

As a developer, sports enthusiast, and blog owner, I decided to go on a journey to find a good API provider that can be used to automatize sports-related highlights fetching. As such, I came across Highlightly, which looked like a decent basketball highlight aggregator. In the upcoming sections, I will show you a simple way on how you can use this API to enrich your sports blogs.

Prerequisites for API integration

To integrate any API into your blog, there are certain prerequisites you must fulfil. Here’s an approach to addressing these prerequisites for the above-mentioned API:

1. Creating a RapidAPI Account: To begin, you’ll need to create an account on RapidAPI. As of the time of writing this blog, the API is exclusively available through the trusted platform known as RapidAPI. Please visit their website and complete the registration process. Once that’s done, you can proceed to the next step.

2. Choosing Your Tier: The API offers different plans tailored to various needs and budgets. I recommend starting with the BASIC plan and then scaling up as required. It’s important to note that certain leagues, such as the NBA and ACB, are considered premium and are not included in the free tier. Fortunately, there are more than 100 other leagues available that can be used to enrich your sports blog.

3. Securing Your Token: Your RapidAPI token is essential as it enables you to query the highlights API data. It’s crucial to maintain the utmost security for this token and ensure that it is not accessible to anyone else. Think of it as akin to your credit card number; only you should have access to it.

That covers the prerequisites you need to fulfill. Once you have completed all the steps mentioned above, you’ll be ready to start querying the highlights data.

Querying basketball highlights

Let’s explore the exciting realm of retrieving basketball highlights data from the API. As a JavaScript enthusiast, I will demonstrate a couple of methods for querying this API to enhance your sports blogs. You can access the API documentation here. If you are more inclined toward Ruby, Java, Go, or PHP development, you can refer to the RapidAPI endpoint testing page for code snippets.

The API offers several routes, each serving a unique purpose:

• /countries and /countries/{countryCode}: These routes provide country-related data, which is essential for contextualizing basketball highlights.

• /teams and /teams/{team_id}: You can obtain team-specific information through these routes.

• /leagues and /leagues/{league_id}: League routes grant you access to valuable league-related data, aiding in the precision of your search for highlights.

• /matches and /matches/{match_id}: These routes offer match-specific details, allowing you to pinpoint the highlights of a particular game.

• /highlights and /highlights/{highlight_id}: At the core of the API, these routes are where the magic happens. Here, you can retrieve the actual highlights that elevate the quality of your blog.

Country, team, and league routes serve as utility routes primarily used to fetch matches and their associated highlights. However, it’s worth noting that the API is designed to be straightforward and user-friendly, eliminating the need for complex IDs.

Let’s create a simple function that will trigger an HTTP request to retrieve highlights data:

const axios = require("axios");

const fetchBasketballHighlightsData = async (queryParams) => {
  const options = {
    method: 'GET',
    url: 'https://basketball-highlights-api.p.rapidapi.com/highlights',
    params: queryParams,
    headers: {
      'X-RapidAPI-Key': '<API TOKEN>',
      'X-RapidAPI-Host': 'basketball-highlights-api.p.rapidapi.com'
    }
  };

  try {
    const response = await axios.request(options);
    console.log(response.data);
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
  }
};

Remember to replace <API TOKEN> with your own Rapid API key, which you receive upon subscribing to any tier of the API. With this function in your toolkit, you can fetch data in a variety of ways. For instance:

fetchBasketballHighlightsData({
  timezone: 'Europe/London',
  date: '2023-10-01'
});

The above function call would result in the following data:

It’s essential to note that the API supports a wide range of query parameters, not just the date parameter as demonstrated in the example. Another key point to remember is that responses are paginated. If the total count exceeds the limit, you can increase the offset to retrieve the next batch of highlights.

While we could continue to demonstrate various ways to query highlights using league, country, and team query parameters, I believe you already have a good understanding of how this API operates. For a more comprehensive guide, I recommend visiting either the API’s documentation or RapidAPI’s endpoint testing page.

Conclusion

In the fast-paced world of sports technology, real-time highlights coverage has emerged as a critical challenge. Scouring the internet to find highlights that you wish to integrate into your sports blog can become cumbersome and frustrating. In this blog, we’ve unveiled a simple yet immensely powerful solution — an API aggregator for Basketball Highlights that is poised to revolutionize how sports enthusiasts experience the game. The API gathers highlight clips, game recaps, interviews, and even nail-biting moments like last-minute shots, all in real-time.

For those eager to embark on this exciting journey into the realm of real-time highlights, the BASIC plan serves as an ideal starting point. It offers a glimpse into the API’s capabilities, providing access to almost all of the leagues (certain popular leagues like the NBA and ACB are excluded). This allows you to gain an understanding of how the API operates and its potential to enhance your sports blog. However, for those truly passionate about providing their users with unlimited access to highlights from all leagues, the PRO plan and higher tiers are available.