Hi PH! I’m Declan, one of the cofounders of Hyperbeam along with Philip and Amby. Today we're ecstatic to announce the Hyperbeam API! Massive thanks to @mwseibel for hunting us. 🤔 What is the Hyperbeam API? The Hyperbeam API makes it easy for developers to add “multiplayer web browsers” to their products. These allow users to browse the web together—or you can restrict it to specific websites. Philip, Amby, and I stumbled across this idea when we built a watch party site called hyperbeam.com in college. We noticed that other watch party solutions were unreliable and annoying to use, so we spent two years building “multiplayer web browsers” to allow friends to watch stuff together online with ease. After growing hyperbeam.com to 150k MAUs, we had several companies reach out asking to buy our multiplayer browsing tech. It turns out that multiplayer web browsers aren’t just a great solution for watch parties, but also for remote learning and collaboration. As such, we decided to sell multiplayer web browsers as an API. That way other companies can build products to better connect others without going through two years of WebRTC hell like we did. USE CASES 🧑‍🏫 Remote Learning (e.g. teachwithkoala.com) Keeping students engaged while learning online is the #1 challenge for remote educators. Many teachers try to use various apps to maintain engagement, but students often have trouble concentrating as they constantly need to switch apps and tabs. ‍Hyperbeam’s multiplayer browser API allows developers to easily embed multiplayer versions of almost any web application directly into their products. The result is a hassle-free experience for educators and a highly engaging experience for students. 💻 Remote Collaboration (e.g. gather.town) “Can you see my screen?” “Your video is frozen.” “Can you try hovering over that button? No, the other one.” Remote workers run into screen-sharing issues on a daily basis. As a result, many developers are forced to build and maintain app integrations in order to improve the experience. With the Hyperbeam API, developers can provide remote workers with a fast, hassle-free, and highly collaborative alternative to screen share and third-party integrations. 👾 Online Social (e.g. branch.gg) Designing, coding, and testing new social activities is time-consuming. Building on the web is particularly difficult, as computer networking on the web can take a long time to get right. With the Hyperbeam API, social platform developers can easily provide users with thousands of social activities such as watch parties to experience via multiplayer browsers. ___ ⚙️ How does it work? We allow developers to embed multiplayer web browsers in their web apps with only a few lines of code. Users can then visit any website from inside the web app together. Developers can specify control permissions, programmatically navigate to specific URLs, and hide the browser UI so apps appear as if they are natively integrated. We accomplish this by hosting a Chromium browser instance on our server, recording the video and audio output and streaming it to all participants using WebRTC. This sounds simple, but hosting full-blown Chromium instances is challenging, especially doing it cost-effectively. That’s why we spent two years optimizing our tech—so we can make it affordable for other developers. 🧭 Our Mission Building software to connect others is hard. We experienced this first-hand while building hyperbeam.com. As such, we're on a mission to improve people’s lives by enabling developers to easily build intimate, productive, and genuinely enjoyable experiences for remote users. If you're interested in trying out the API you can request a free playground API key here: https://forms.gle/ogJadh4M2trDDrsN7 Also, here's our API Docs: https://showy-backpack-b3f.notio... Finally, you can email me at declan@hyperbeam.com with any questions 🙂 Thanks!

Declan Goncalves

Hyperbeam API

Maker

3yr ago

Sarah Chieng

Thrifthouse

@mwseibel @declan_goncalves awesome stuff

Ryan Hoover

Product Hunt

Congrats on the launch, @declan_goncalves and team! I'm somewhat familiar with Liveblocks. Curious how this compares.

Amby Balaji

@rrhoover Great question! Liveblocks lets you add collaboration to your own app (which you have control over the source code), while Hyperbeam lets you embed collaborative versions of any website on the internet in your own site. We accomplish this by letting multiple users control a shared embeddable web browser.

@rrhoover @ambyjkl An example use case is a tutoring platform that wants to allow students and teachers to use third-party drag-and-drop coding tools in their app. The Hyperbeam API allows you to easily embed multiplayer versions of the drag-and-drop tools within your app, whereas Liveblocks would only allow you to add collaborative functionality on top of your own app

Trent Piercy

We love Hyperbeam

@trentpiercy Thanks Trent! How do you use Hyperbeam?

Hyperbeam API

Embed multiplayer web browsers

Embed multiplayer web browsers

Hyperbeam API

Embed multiplayer web browsers

Embed multiplayer web browsers

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