VersusMedia launches Festival API for film festival discovery
The REST API helps filmmaker tools and apps find active festivals accepting submissions across more than 75 countries.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
3 min read
VersusMedia has launched Festival API, a REST service built to help software products find film festivals that are currently taking submissions. The product targets app developers, filmmaker platforms and independent creators who need structured festival data without compiling it by hand from listings, websites and spreadsheets.
The API puts film festival discovery into a format developers can plug into dashboards, submission planners, research tools and other filmmaker-facing products. That matters in a field where deadlines, fees, eligibility rules and festival categories change often, making stale directories less useful for filmmakers deciding where to submit work.
VersusMedia said Festival API tracks more than 2,000 active, verified film festivals across over 30 categories and more than 75 countries. The service is designed to answer a practical question for filmmakers and the software tools that serve them: which festivals are open for submissions now.
Developers can search and filter by category, genre, country, deadline and maximum submission fee. Returned data includes festival fees, accepted categories, genres, eligibility requirements, contact information, venue details and festival rosters.
The service returns data in JSON, allowing developers to add festival listings and submission information to products without building their own data collection systems. Festival API also includes a proprietary Festival Score, a 0-to-100 relevance rating meant to rank festivals against a specific film.
According to the company, that score weighs factors such as category match, genre fit, fee reasonableness, deadline timing and other submission-fit signals. The feature is intended for recommendation tools, filmmaker dashboards, festival discovery apps, AI submission planners and entertainment research products.
The API covers traditional film categories such as shorts, features, documentaries, animation, horror, sci-fi, comedy, experimental work, music videos and student films. It also includes LGBTQ+, environmental, faith-based, cultural and diaspora festivals, along with newer formats including AI film, VR and 360 video, vertical shorts, web series, branded content and creator content.
VersusMedia is also offering lightweight client libraries for common developer environments. Those libraries are meant to shorten the work needed to add festival search, scoring, category lookup, country filtering and roster data to applications.
The launch extends into VersusMedia’s own artist dashboard. Artists who have uploaded at least one video to the platform can now use a Festival Search feature powered by the film festival discovery API for developers, giving them access to similar search tools inside the existing creator interface.
Founder Ryan Vinson framed the launch as an extension of VersusMedia’s work with independent creators, saying the company wants filmmakers, platforms and creative technology firms to have access to structured industry data. VersusMedia was founded in 2001 and operates as an independent film and music platform focused on digital distribution, streaming channels, creator tools and developer APIs.