But some questions hadn’t been asked, nor answered.After a movie is released, how much would a movie be able to list for on a Video on Demand (VOD) platform?Can I forecast this price in advance so I can decide if I want to pay for it?Or could another VOD provider use this information to compete with iTunes on price?Can a Subscription Video on Demand provider like Netflix use this information to optimise their pricing strategy?Much better than looking at cricket data.But very few datasets provided the connection between movies and their list price on iTunes, or other VOD platforms.Eventually, I turned to open source movie databases such as The Movie Database and Open Movie Database, which I combined with the iTunes data to analyse the data..This was not without its challenges though..You can look at my script and exploratory analysis on Github, but stay tuned for a blog post on my whole data collection process soon.Everyone who has valuable data uses an APII’m no expert in internet protocol, server scripting or database architecture and engineering..But I don’t think I’m far off the mark with this one.I relied heavily on using APIs through my data collection process, but I also used web scraping techniques to gather my data..I found myself making much less queries to the website/server using an API, which provided me a way of making a structured query to get all the data I needed..Nothing superfluous or noisy.It’s important for organisations to understand why an API layer will benefit them:You can protect your servers that host your information.You’ll protect the data that powers your business.It helps your partners and collaborators get the data and information that they need, easily and safely.You can manage your server resources by tweaking rate limits.You are in ultimate control of how you want data to be coming in and out of your servers.The analogy of an API being a a bartender is particularly useful..Instead of opening up your data ‘buffet’ style, where people would tend to adopt a grab-first-ask-questions-later mentality, it’s much better to have a guy to control how much food gets consumed..Pretty neat stuff.Thanks for reading my first blog post..I’ll be posting more updates as my project progresses and thoughts bubble to the surface.. More details