Thanks for asking, NRK beta, I’ll give you my suggestions for what an NRK API could contain.

I saw good suggestions in the blog comments already. One thing I totally agree with is a REST-style API – it works great with a bare minimum of setup, and I think a low threshold for accessing the API is very important for good ideas to be transformed into great implementations.

So, without further ado:

• This one is obvious, but: TV and Radio schedules with possibility of fetching by time range, specific program, specific channel, type of program, topic, even content and actors; if this is part of the NRK archive (see next point).
• Open access to whatever metadata NRK has in their archives. I can only imagine what is stored in relation to each program, but imagine for example a site indexing the political programs of NRK where you can pit two politicians against eachother and find their earlier debates and hot topics. Or indeed news content, a good search engine for tv and radio news clips would be great if the metadata is there.
• Now, if the metadata is not there, or does not contain as much as I would hope, make the API so it has some social or community aspects. I am absolutely positive that if you allow input too, people tagging programs, describing clips, relating certain clips to others (not just by tags but by a full-blown community-supported Topic Map), you would within a short time attract a lot of people interested in helping out. Particularily if the promise and emphasis is to keep all this open and let the public reap the rewards.
• Serving content in various formats. Examples could include: http://nrk.no/content/lydverket/latest/wmv or http://nrk.no/content/dagsrevyen/2008-02-13/torrent.

The potential is in the mashups – having all this content and metadata available openly makes my head spin with excitement! You asked..?