“With the frequent, often last minute, changes in content flow the title expiration data available through our API has been inaccurate, so we have decided to no longer publish this information,” a Netflix spokesperson said via email. The company’s Director of Engineering – API Daniel Jacobson reiterated this point in a post on the company’s developer blog, adding that members will still be able to find the expiration date for each movie or TV show episode on the title’s web page.

The move will likely impact a number of third-party services, and comes two months after Netflix essentially closed its public API to all newcomers. Back in March, Netflix said that it was no longer issuing new API keys because the way the company was changing the API had changed: Initially meant to enable third-party apps, Netflix’s API has been playing a key component for the technology behind the company’s streaming service.

Restrictions to public APIs have been a common pattern for companies like Netflix and Twitter in recent months, but it looks like there may have been another reason for Monday’s changes: Netflix took a number of titles off its catalog in early May, leading some publications to write about “the great Netflix Instant vanishing of 2013” or even a “Streamageddon purge.”

Not all of those stories were completely accurate. Some reported a number of 2000 titles disappearing, but Deadline put the number close to 1000. And reports that Warner was pulling titles off of Netflix to power its own streaming service were quickly denied by the studio.

Netflix clearly wasn’t happy about all that streamageddon talk. Now it looks like it pulled the plug on another part of its API to prevent us from freaking out in the future — like at the end of the month, when a number of Viacom shows are set to disappear from the service.

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Providing an API that is resilient enough to handle these kinds of demands is not a small feat, and Jacobson’s slides reveal some of the principles behind the architecture used for the task. However, there’s an even bigger story to this: The sole reason that Netflix’s API has gotten so popular in the last two years is that the company’s service is seeing huge amounts of traffic from connected devices.

Netflix originally built its API with third-party developers in mind, which used it to build websites and apps to manage one’s DVD queue and similar things. However, the Netflix engineering team eventually realized that it could use the very same API to bring Netflix to devices like the Roku, the PS3 and the Xbox. To see how much of an impact that decision had, check out where API requests came from in 2008:

Compare that with API requests in 2011:

Guess which segment Netflix is focusing on these days? Exactly:

Check out Jacobson’s entire presentation below:

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