Viral Radar: Short-Video Velocity Monitor
Snapshots short-video counters across platforms into SQLite and ranks by views per hour and acceleration.
TikTok via public creative-center endpoints when the main site is geo-blocked, Instagram and Facebook through a dedicated logged-in browser profile with fragment-merging for split payloads, and an HTML report of what is accelerating.
- Velocity and acceleration ranking across snapshots
- Geo-block worked around via public creative-center data
- Fragmented Facebook payloads merged by id
- Single-command login, collect, report and run
Picking topics for short videos is easier when you can see what is accelerating right now rather than what has already peaked. Viral Radar collects view, like and comment counters for short videos across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, stores each snapshot in SQLite, and ranks items by views per hour and by acceleration between snapshots, producing an HTML report.
Each platform needed its own route. The main TikTok site is geo-blocked from the local network and the usual downloader's tag extractor is broken, so data comes from the platform's public creative-center JSON endpoints, with their signed-out caps documented. Instagram and Facebook refuse anonymous requests, so the collector drives a real browser on its own profile; the Instagram search endpoint returns reels with play counts even in a hidden tab (with throttling observed after a few rounds), while Facebook reels have no view count and arrive split across several response fragments that the store merges by video id.
The tool is deliberately a monitor, not a poster, and its findings feed the Shorts and documentary pipelines.
How it works
- Configured hashtags and queries are polled per platform
- Counters are stored as timestamped snapshots
- Velocity and acceleration are computed per item
- HTML report ranks the fastest movers