November 2021 Summaries

Daily’s React Native library allows developers to build mobile apps compatible with both Android and iOS with one codebase, making it easier for web developers to write code that will get compiled into native mobile code with a smaller learning curve. The Daily Playground demo app uses more of a traditional video call format, allowing participants to turn on and off audio and video as needed. To build this app, developers need to have some React Native knowledge and be familiar with the library's functionality. The tutorial covers how to create a multi-participant video call in React Native using react-native-daily-js, give call participants control of their devices, and render participant media. It also discusses how to iterate over the participant list, controlling local devices in-call, and rendering participant media. The app features an in-call view with a tray that allows users to toggle their camera and microphone, as well as leave the current call.

MeetAnyway has established itself as a fast-growing company in the online events space, providing flexible alternatives to traditional video conferencing tools and platforms. The company's co-CEO, Marc Metz, explains that he understands the industry intimately, having worked on opulent parties before pivoting to design a platform that integrated video calling and provided flexible options for engagement and connection. MeetAnyway allows event planners to create different types of online spaces within a single event, providing various user experiences for attendees. The platform emphasizes organizer support and user experience, with reliable video call quality being central to this experience. After testing multiple video APIs, the team found Daily, which provided the reliability they needed. With Daily integrated into their platform, MeetAnyway can host events almost immediately, offering quick solutions for building flexible video experiences. The company sees online events as a key way to connect people in meaningful ways, providing a space for gathering communities and facilitating growth and success.

The Party Line app is an audio-only solution to help users avoid Zoom fatigue by reducing cognitive resources required during calls. It was created as part of Daily's focus on supporting audio-only apps with APIs. The React Native version of the app, called Party Line, allows users to join or create audio calls and includes features like participant management, moderation, and muting. The app uses the react-native-daily-js library and follows a component-based structure, including the CallProvider component that manages global app state and handles actions related to joining and leaving calls. The app also addresses device permissions by setting videoSource to false when creating the local call object instance. To get started with Party Line, developers need basic React Native knowledge and can follow tutorials and resources provided by Daily for further guidance.

Daily Prebuilt provides a solution for video calls by automatically setting participants' names before joining a call. However, there may be cases where the name form is not ideal, such as when embedding Daily Prebuilt in an app with its own external form to get the participant's name. To bypass this, two solutions are provided: using a meeting token or utilizing the createFrame and join methods to set the local username before joining. The enable_prejoin_ui room setting controls whether the prejoin UI view and name form are shown, and both solutions can be used to skip seeing Daily Prebuilt's name form and preset the username. Additionally, passing a username to createFrame, join, or setting it in a token can achieve this effect. Understanding these options is crucial for customizing the video call experience with Daily Prebuilt.

We explored how to build a custom chat widget in a Vue app using Daily's sendAppMessage method, which allows sending messages to anyone in the call. We demonstrated three main steps: sending messages with `sendAppMessage()`, receiving and displaying messages with an event handler, and displaying messages in the Chat UI by passing the messages array as a prop from Call to Chat. The chat widget can now send, receive, and display all messages, and we discussed its limitations and potential applications beyond just chat functionality.

Daily, a video platform company, has secured $40 million in funding led by Roseanne Wincek at Renegade Partners. The company was founded as a bet on the future of video and audio on the internet, with a focus on building developer tools that expand access to high-performance video platforms. Daily aims to build the most robust video platform in the world, making it available to every developer and product team. With this funding, the company is accelerating its work on critical building blocks such as global infrastructure for low-latency streaming, cross-platform APIs, real-time dashboards, and terrific documentation. New features include large-scale sessions with flexible track subscriptions, native iOS and Android libraries written in Rust, and server-side video and audio rendering. The company is also publishing volume pricing discounts to support scalable applications and growing its team, including the addition of Chief Product Technology Officer Varun Singh and VP of Engineering Sarah Milstein. Daily values kindness, diversity, and working on interesting problems with people they respect, and invites developers interested in collaborating with them to reach out.

When a CEO at Pitch, a collaborative presentation platform, requested the integration of video calls, the engineering team was initially skeptical about its feasibility. However, after reviewing Daily, a developer platform that provides cross-platform functionality and seamless transitions between peer-to-peer and SFU connections, they decided to integrate it into their product. With Daily's APIs, the Pitch team was able to build a polished, battle-tested, and developer-friendly video calling feature in just three weeks, which has become an integral part of their product, emphasizing elements like frictionless user experience, beautiful design, and multiplayer collaboration. The integration of live video calls has transformed presentations and how teams work together, aligning with Pitch's core values of giving users great tools and creating a seamless user experience.

At Daily, a developer tools company, they aimed to improve their documentation platform by integrating it into their existing ecosystem. They realized that documentation is a crucial part of both the product and customer journey, and therefore made performance, branding, flexibility, and integration key considerations in their new platform. The platform was built on top of Next.js, React, Typescript, shared components, MDX, and Vercel, which provided a strong foundation for a modern JAMStack approach. The new platform allows for automation to generate parts of the documentation while still prioritizing human-in-the-loop style documentation. It also aims to support a multi-platform future with SDKs, REST APIs, and in-depth guides, making it an integral part of their multi-SDK future. The platform has shown significant performance improvements on both desktop and mobile devices, thanks to pre-rendering static pages served via CDN, reduced client-side rendering, and drastically reduced page size.

This post is the third in a series about building custom video chat applications that support large meetings using the Daily call object. The features added specifically target use cases where dozens (or hundreds!) of participants in an up to 1000 person call might be turning on their cameras. WebRTC simulcast allows multiple resolutions, bitrates, and frame rates to be sent from a single source track, with the SFU deciding which layer to forward based on network quality. The Daily receiveSettings API is used to request specific simulcast encoding settings to preserve participant bandwidth and CPU on large calls. A practical use case is adding dynamic simulcast encoding to a participant video grid, where lower quality videos save downstream bandwidth and impact CPU performance. The final feature introduces selective simulcast encoding to the React app, updating the app logic to request a specific track layer based on the number of visible participants.