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

Designing and building a unique video experience in record time

When live video collaboration became part of Pitch’s vision, the engineering and design team were given a week to prototype and four weeks to launch. Paulus Esterhazy, Principal Engineer at Pitch, evaluated a few different video call APIs, and even considered building the feature from scratch. The task seemed impossible but “we changed our mind after taking a close look at Daily,” Esterhazy said.

The Pitch team were able to build a prototype in a few hours by following Daily tutorials. Steps like creating rooms with the API were intuitive. "Other APIs got in the way, but Daily works as you'd expect."

Getting started with Daily was “one of the best onboarding experiences we’ve had,” from the high quality of Daily docs to customer support. Esterhazy describes Daily's platform as "polished, battle-tested, and developer friendly." Ultimately, the team built video calls into their visionary workflow (in just four weeks).

Daily delivered

• More intuitive APIs than other platforms, with exceptional developer support
• The flexibility to build video into an existing workflow
• Performant video features, which supported the team's original designs

Product highlights

Video seamlessly integrated in an existing workflow

Pitch’s design team wanted a video experience that felt completely organic to Pitch. The team had already planned a live collaboration element: a cursor view, where collaborators can see each other’s mouse cursors as they work on the same presentation. Using Daily’s call object, the team were able to build on this foundation and incorporate video into this UI.

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 of this feature 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.