ShareTube (& ProductHunt’s front page love)

A little more on the what/why/how

We’ve been getting tremendous love and feedback from the producthunt community, as well as an ask for something about the development/stack from Marcel Reschke, so wanted to share a post on what/why/how we did!

What

ShareTube is an easy way to sync videos across multiple clients in a “room,” which you can share with your friends with a link, of format: “sharetube.io/room/<ROOM_NAME>”.

It syncs the videos to the second, tracks together everyone’s playback speed, and allows users to do instant youtube search within the room page search engine.

Why

One of the makers (Vincent) is in a long-distance relationship, and he wanted to watch movies with his girlfriend online, easily, together. Currently, the solution is to get to a youtube video or movie, count down, and click play at the same time. Cute and anachronistic. There’s also some services out there that try to do syncing properly, but are way more ads-heavy and janky.

So, overall, we knew that it’s hard to replicate the experience of watching videos with friends online. Vincent Tian, Kunal Shah, and I thought we could do better.

How

We got together around Christmas time to do a quick project. We spent a few hours talking about ideas, and decided that there’s lots of cool things to do in video-sharing, especially for long-distance relationships. Taking inspiration from Plug.dj/Turntable.fm, we decided to make something for people to watch videos together online. The user experience we envisioned was simple, clean, lightweight.

Design Process

We knew, from talking to quite a few couples, that there was a need for some kind of syncing service that was easy to use and “safe-feeling” (popups-free, ad-light, etc.) There were plenty of folks who noted “there’s something like that already existing…” But we wanted to have fun with a side-project, and anyways, we believe, a la Aaron Levie from Box:

“Does it better” will always beat “did it first.”

We also realized the untapped potential for growth in crowd-sourcing, and curating, videos from a group (Pinterest for videos?). However, we wanted to keep this focused on a few core users, and then build off of the best platform for this core demographic. We decided to focus on long-distance couples and close friends watching videos.

We moved to thinking about the experience. In light of our principles to keep the experience simple, clean, and lightweight, we wanted to keep the rooms transient, so that there wasn’t any annoying “room squatters” or too many namespace conflicts. Similarly, the user-signin process was as invisible/forgettable as possible (it’s just one screen, one field, for your username).

We wanted to keep the experience simple, clean and lightweight

Our first prototype (da real MVP):

Technologies

With the idea in mind, we then scoped out the specs and the tools we’d have to use, and followed the typical MVC model. We had room, video, playlist, and user model. The views were just the landing page and room (with appropriate ejs partials). We settled on a MEAN stack with AJAX/Websockets for refresh-less page loading — in line with our core design principle around having a seamless, lightweight experience.

MongoDB was a nice choice because we wanted to code up something quickly, and wasn’t sure about the exact structure of our models, so we wanted to use a tool that would allow us the flexibility, and let us experiment quickly, at the loss of some speed for data access.

We deployed this on a Heroku dyno (we love heroku for its usability) and then launched it.