Content Indexing & Media Feeds about content-index

[jeffposnick]

(This is a bit of a coincidence, because 9 years ago[!] I wrote https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/03/tag-your-tv-shows.html while a member of Google's Video Search DevRel team, and spent a decent amount of time working with video sitemaps and mRSS then.)

I've primarily found the Content Indexing API useful for adding non-media URLs, like article pages. In some cases, it's been a struggle to even come up with an image file to use as the thumbnail for an entry, and I've just used the favicon for the site.

In the future, especially as making web media content available offline becomes more common, we might have more web apps that attempt to index URLs that are effectively dedicated playback pages. But even at that point, I think the offline requirement means that running some local JavaScript in to figure out the current cache state is always going to be required for Content Indexing usage.

That's a different enough requirement than what's needed to create a media feed that I don't see the two APIs converging.