In a way, it and Shindig are both trying to create a new type of virtual office culture. Remotion only launched its first private alpha test in January, but it sped up its plans as more teams started working from home. The Remotion app tries to make video chat as easy as texting or dropping by someone's cubicle. Remotion mimics some of the dynamics of an office - closing your door to signify you're busy, poking your head into someone's cubicle for a quick chat - through video. "They're not trying to create a new behavior - they're trying to get this behavior back even though they're remote." Leaving a Zoom call on all day might approximate the same thing, he said, but with a much higher psychological (and bandwidth) burden. "Teams are really used to having informal chats that are unscheduled," Embiricos said. If someone's Open, all you do is click on their face and start talking. Remotion spent a lot of time working on a sort of status system: Users can mark themselves Away, Around or Open, and can say what app they're currently using or who they're talking to. On top of that, scheduling a video call immediately makes it feel like a meeting. "Our thesis is that the reason you don't talk to people frequently when you're remote is because you don't have that team awareness of who's free versus who's heads-down," he said. Lots of video services think this way, but Remotion designed around it: Calls live in a small round window, as if you're chatting through a ship's porthole.īut Embiricos echoes the point that the video isn't even really the thing. Alexander Embiricos, one of Remotion's co-founders, described his company's product as a replacement for the casual drop-by chats you might have in a physical office. Rather than build a virtual event that deserves and rewards your whole attention, Remotion wants to make video as low-key as possible. "And then stream it on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to everyone else."Ī second startup, Remotion, has almost the exact opposite idea. "We could bring up each student one after the other to have their moment of acknowledgement with the principal, in front of family, friends and everyone," he said. Gottlieb told me he's been talking to a bank that might want to pay to stage a number of virtual high school graduations. Politicians have used the platform to host interactive town halls, and authors have had book events. After initially building on Flash, Shindig rebuilt its tech stack, allowing it to handle the huge uptick in users over the past few months. Shindig has been around for almost a decade, but Gottlieb senses this is his company's moment. (Remember those?) Even the user interface looks more like a stage and a crowd rather than simply a grid of faces. Attendees can start private chats with a couple of clicks, not unlike whispering in the audience or hanging out in the lobby of a real-life convention center. The service tries to more accurately reflect the experience of an in-person conference: Panelists can easily invite attendees to the virtual stage, or take and share questions. Shindig's hope is to help define the virtual future of all the conferences getting canceled this year. Unlike most videoconference services, Shindig is designed specifically with large groups in mind. You're going to give your undivided attention and have no agency? Why show up at a particular time and place if it's no different than watching the video?" "Events work because they marry the group agenda with the individual agenda. Webinars, though? Gottlieb hates webinars. It's now not much harder to build a half-decent videoconferencing service than to do messaging or email. "The big technical challenge 10 years ago was the fact that there was no standard in the browser, and you had the problems of interoperability between mobile and the operating systems." That's been figured out, thanks to the WebRTC standard and other tech. And two-person video is basically a solved problem. Shindig's big idea, Gottlieb told me, is that a good video experience for two people is completely different than for 200.
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