How Pitch built a video chat into an existing workflow with Daily — in just four weeks

Key wins

• When live video collaboration became part of Pitch’s vision, Pitch’s design team knew they wanted a video experience that felt completely organic to their product. Using Daily’s call object, the team were able to seamlessly integrate video into their existing workflow. 

• The team built a prototype in a few hours by following Daily tutorials. Steps like creating rooms with the API were intuitive. According to Paulus Esterhazy, Principal Engineer at Pitch, "other APIs got in the way, but Daily works as you'd expect.” 
• During their evaluation, Pitch found that certain video call APIs were skewed towards 1:1 use cases, or made it difficult (or impossible) to move smoothly from peer-to-peer to SFU calls. Daily offered unrivaled flexibility, switching seamlessly between SFU and p2p connections between calls. 
• Pitch has been able to leverage Daily’s functionality in ways which carry over to the UI. The “pulsing” of the video bubbles in Pitch is a CSS animation which responds to Daily’s built-in audio capture feature. 
• Working with Daily was “one of the best onboarding experiences we’ve had,” Esterhazy said, crediting the support team and high-quality documentation. Ultimately, Daily provided a “polished, battle-tested, and developer-friendly platform.”

How Pitch designed and built a unique video experience in record time

Pitch has rethought the way teams create and share presentations, making the process fast, effortless, and fun. When their CEO wanted to incorporate live video chat into their product four weeks before launching the platform in beta,  Paulus Esterhazy, Principal Engineer at Pitch, was skeptical. Esterhazy knew that webRTC was powerful enough to deliver the call functions he needed, but building the feature in four weeks seemed impossible. “We changed our mind after taking a close look at Daily,” Esterhazy explained. 

When Pitch designer and developer Jelle Akkerman began to think about UI design, he knew that video needed to feel completely organic to their product— not the same video calling grid, bolted on. Akkerman was inspired by the live collaboration element that Pitch already planned to build into their product: the cursor view, where collaborators can see each other’s mouse cursors as they work on the same presentation. It made sense to build on this foundation.

Akkerman built the original prototype in Pitch by prototyping in WebRTC and playing with HTML media elements. The Daily platform allowed the Pitch team to build beyond their prototype, iterating quickly. “It would’ve been harder to iterate in a design tool because it’s not live,” Akkerman explained. 

Pitch’s live video collaboration feature extended the possibilities for team collaboration within the tool—and ultimately, how teams are able to work together.  

Product highlights

A seamless video experience

By building on Daily’s call object, Pitch has made video calling feel completely native. 

An innovative UI

With Pitch’s live collaboration feature, a Pitch document becomes a video chat room. A collaborator’s mouse cursor is accompanied by their video stream in a circle. During a live session, a user’s video pulses as they talk, or a mute icon appears over a user’s video when their audio is disabled.

Performant video

The Pitch team had originally coded a prototype from scratch, including a reactive audio feature that pulsed to show when a collaborator spoke, which was really CPU intensive. The “pulsing” of the video bubbles today is a performant CSS animation which responds to Daily’s built-in audio capture feature.