
Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13) - jsherwani
https://slackhq.com/screen-sharing-in-slack-made-interactive-cf8816efaa01
======
kjksf
People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death
MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas
and find first customers.

Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face.

Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4
devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in
Jan 20015, so it's less than 2 years.

You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for
and enough of a "outside of Slack" market to sustain a small company.

On launch you'll get free PR just by announcing "Screenhero alternative".

And if you do a good job, it's likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack
competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum.

Lot's of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall
traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for
matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows).

It's not easy but it's also not a problem that requires breaking new ground,
just solid engineering.

What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and
bemoaning that someone didn't write OSS (aka free) clone.

~~~
zpr
You mean you could make a YouTube clone in a weekend? It's easy to fall into
this way of thinking. But hey, maybe you will build the next Screenhero, or
TeamViewer. Or maybe you'll end up as one of the thousands of other versions
of this nobody has ever heard of. The idea is usually not the hard part.

~~~
kjksf
I mean that you can make a Screenhero clone in approximately the same amount
of time that it took to write it originally. Should be a bit less because
straight path (cloning) is shorter than twisty one (things that Screenhero did
that did not end up in the final product).

Note that by the time of Slack acquisition Screenhero was approaching v2.0,
they had product out far longer than that. So it's not unreasonable to say you
could do a v1 of similar product in a year.

Both idea and execution are hard. Cloning existing idea removes one hard part,
therefore increasing the chances of success. Look at Excel, Word or Baidu or
Sina Weibo.

As to "thousands of other versions of this": you would have to point to at
least one. It's hard to argue against imaginary products.

Based on this thread for many people Screenhero has no acceptable substitute.

~~~
zpr
I can agree that when you have clearly defined business goals its easier to
spit out a product. And I'm not arguing that you could make something similar
to Screenhero in a year -- the hard part would be to distinguish it from the
thousands of others. You could find examples with some Googling (remote
desktop software, screen sharing software): GoToMeeting, Join.me,
LogMeIn/Hamachi, RealVNC, not to mention built in RDC in Windows, etc. Those
are just the famous/obvious ones. If you kept digging, I'm sure you could
easily find hundreds if not thousands of similar solutions.

I understand they're slightly different from one another, and I suppose its
possible all the commenters here went through each and every one of these
options and found nothing useable but it seems unlikely to me, and similarly
unlikely the +1 one would make in this pool would be any sort of revolutionary
"game changer" VCs would mob onto. The space seems well-established or dare I
say it "saturated".

------
tarikjn
I wish this was forked instead of killed. Everytime I use Screenhero, it has
been butter smooth.

I would be ready to pay $3/month for screenhero standalone or a pay-per-use.
I'm not interested in Slack, the use cases are clearly different.

I think Slack missed or rather killed an opportunity here, they could have
kept Screenhero (and use it to upsell Slack) and also integrated it in Slack.
Not only that but it took them over 2 years to make this integration and in
the meantime Screenhero remained invite-only.

~~~
skrowl
Have you tried Discord? It's geared towards gamers but it's got most of the
features we needed from Slack.

More info: [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/articles/11500098275...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/articles/115000982752-Screen-sharing-Video-Calls)

~~~
eltoozero
Due to shenanigans toward Jason Scott[0], and the whole "Hype Squad" thing I
have zero interest in supporting Discord.

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/i/web/status/903663357210841088?lang=en](https://twitter.com/i/web/status/903663357210841088?lang=en)

~~~
wink
I fail to see the "offense". Maybe the tone in that email is aggravating to
you as it seems to be for him, but... I can only shrug and wonder. I'd say
it's not a bit worse than half of the promotional emails from services I (or
my company) pay for in a week...

------
davideous
Stand-alone ScreenHero sharing is smooth as butter -- truly amazing.
Controlling a remote computer feels local.

Right now I'm using the slack-integrated "ScreenHero", and it's really laggy.
This is super disappointing, and painful to use. It's actually making the
mouse pointer of the person sharing lag for them.

Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated
one have the same performance.

~~~
Osiris
Why has "smooth as butter" become such an overly used phrase in the tech
world? Listening to the last Apple product release I must have heard the word
butter a few dozen times.

I don't know about anyone else but this phrase is really starting to annoy me.
It's overly used, and the word "butter" in my mind is closer to "greasy", like
"don't touch it with your finger because it'll get slimy and you'll have to
wash your hands". Can't you just say "smooth" or "without any perceptible
lag"?

EDIT: Seriously, this doesn't bug anyone else?

~~~
hbosch
"Smooth as butter", "smoother than butter", "butter smooth", et al is a common
western phrase. It's as old or older than the King James Bible itself (Psalms
55:21 if you're curious). It's a quintessential English idiom.

~~~
exhilaration
Thank you, that's fascinating!

 _Psalm 55:21 King James Version (KJV)

21\. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his
heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords._

~~~
cat199
While this is true idomatically,

there was also a 'Project Butter' designed to make Android 'Buttery Smooth' a
few years back - I think the high level of application of this idiom to video
rendering specifically took hold at that point..

------
adamwathan
Really disappointing news, rolling Screenhero into Slack doesn't solve the
same problem at all.

I work for myself and have a large contact list of people who don't know each
other who I often pair with or screenshare with. With Slack, there's really no
way for me to create the same setup.

I'd need to create a new team called "Adam's Screenhero Contacts", invite all
of my contacts (who don't know each other) to be part of this "team" together,
and I'd have to foot the bill for the whole team since there's no way for each
individual to pay for their own Slack account.

Is there a viable Screenhero alternative out there yet?

~~~
sosuke
They can't take control of your screen but I like
[https://appear.in/](https://appear.in/)

~~~
s_kilk
I’ll second this, appear.in is great for lightweight small-group video chats.

~~~
anfedorov
I think this might fall under "doesn't solve the same problem at all".

~~~
sosuke
You can share your screen but you cannot share control of your screen.
Screenhero was the word on sharing control.

------
tedmiston
Screenhero is hands down the best (smoothest) screen sharing app I've ever
used.

It's bittersweet to see them acquired by Slack as a paid only feature, but I'm
happy for the team and it seems like a very ideal kind of acquisition where
they solve a problem Slack has and wasn't solving well, and then Slack can
scale the Screenhero userbase overnight.

Edit: I just tried this feature in Slack with /call then enabling others to
edit and it didn't seem to be as smooth as the usual Screenhero experience. I
wonder if something was changed in the integration.

~~~
jsherwani
Screenhero co-founder here. We're committed to making Slack Calls better, and
have a number of upcoming improvements in the works.

~~~
49531
Yea I found the window a bit harder to control as well. I'm also really bummed
because I'm not sure how I am going to help my little sister learn to code now
that we can't screenhero together. Not gonna make a paid slack channel just
for that.

~~~
tedmiston
Maybe a shared online "cloud IDE" fits your use case? Something like
[https://glitch.com/](https://glitch.com/).

------
rsoto
I'm going to mention Jitsi Meet[1] since nobody has mentioned it. 6 months or
so ago I started looking for a simple, reliable and cheap option to share a
screen. I don't like GoToMeeting because it's too enterprise-y and there are a
lot of steps involved—not too friendly for my tastes. And there are a few like
that.

I stumbled upon Screenhero, but it was already too late—Slack bought it and
it's not possible to create a new account.

What we chose for a few weeks was Appear.in—a simple, painless and reliable
tool. However I feel like it's not polished enough, and some of our clients
had issues with it, so I kept looking.

Jitsi has been a blast: just install an extension (or no extension if you're
on Firefox) and you're ready to go. It's uncluttered, it's reliable and too
good to be free to be honest.

Only downside it's that all the URLs are public and since there are no
registration involved, there's no admin on each channel.

1: [https://meet.jit.si/](https://meet.jit.si/)

------
Mindstormy
I use screenhero daily for work and I am incredibly sad to see it go, even
though we all knew this day was coming. It hits even harder for me since my
company just moved us off of slack due to their lack of hippa compliance and
cost issues, so not only is the standalone screenhero gone, I've lost the
ability to use it in slack too. Does anyone have a good suggestion for an
alternative?

~~~
e40
You mean HIPAA? Assuming so, what were the issues?

~~~
wpietri
I'm curious too. Slack claims HIPAA compliance:
[https://slack.com/security](https://slack.com/security)

~~~
anderiv
Many companies claim HIPAA compliance. That doesn't mean much, though, unless
they're willing to sign a BAA with their customers. I don't have direct
experience with this and our Slack usage, but I'm guessing this is where the
disconnect is.

------
dceddia
And according to @SlackHQ on Twitter, Screenhero is shutting down in a little
over a month:

> Now that Screenhero is fully integrated into Slack, we will be closing
> Screenhero on December 1st.
> [https://screenhero.com/](https://screenhero.com/) for more info!

~~~
house9-2
Its a real bummer, I would much rather pay for Screenhero standalone than
integrated into Slack.

------
vladgur
Does anyone know of the “secret” sauce that made screenhero so much better
than the alternative. When I used it years ago, it was super smooth and felt
more like the real screen rather than the remote screenshare

~~~
ballenf
I have the same question. Using it a lot, there were little quirks that made
it feel like it had very low level access to my Mac. Sometimes it would move
the mouse on my screen outside the SH window, but synced up with the other
person's mouse (on their 2nd monitor not shared). Especially noticeable with
dual screens or when moving the SH window. Kind of hard to explain in words.

------
heliostatic
We're daily SH users, and the voice chat still feels leaps and bounds ahead of
anything else (Slack, Zoom, Chime, etc). Inevitable sunsetting, but sad.

------
bbarn
We user both Slack and Screenhero at work. This is not a move I'm looking
forward to. Slack's Video/Audio issues are so many that we also still use
webex for person to person video chats more often than not. I've been nothing
but disappointed every time I've tried to use slack for something that's not
text based chatting.

------
austenallred
Can someone tell me how screenhero performs in a call of 50+ people? We teach
classes, and Slack is our home base, so Screenhero would be great, but I’m not
sure of how it scales.

~~~
ballenf
As of 12 months ago, I inevitably had problems with more than 3-4 people in a
session. But that was mainly when we'd try to rotate presenters. Got used to
restarting the call in order to pass the baton. Even without rotating however,
there would often be connectivity issues where someone had to drop off and
reconnect. That slowed us down with small groups, so if you had to pause
anytime one of 50 people had connectivity issues I'd guess it would be
unusable unless they fix the connectivity issues.

Have you tried youtube for live streaming? Never tried a private stream, but
they certainly know how to scale video.

~~~
austenallred
We use Zoom and it’s fantastic, just not as tightly integrated into Slack.

------
teeberg
So I suppose that means Screenhero won't be available outside of Slack
anymore? I always found it useful as a stand-alone app when you wanted to let
somebody control your screen that is not on Slack. Anyone have good
alternatives for that?

~~~
AjJi
zoom.us allows remote controls, it worked fine the couple of times I've used
it.

------
lobster_johnson
This is highly appreciated (as someone who never got an invite to Screenhero,
so was never able to compare)!

I hope it's stable. Slack's audio/video conferencing is not exactly... smooth.

In fact, it still boggles my mind that in 2017, conferencing is still in the
stone ages when it comes to reliability.

With Slack I often either get a one-way connection (only one party can hear
the other) or the call is unable to connect, claiming that "Bob ended the
call". Meetings tend to start with five minutes of "Can you hear me? Hello?
Testing, testing..." until we either are able to get a connection, or we give
up and move to Skype, which isn't perfect, but much more reliable.

Incredibly, it also turns out that if you try calling someone who's already
calling you on Slack, _you get a busy error_! How insane is that? We were both
trying to reach each other, both expressing — in terms of UI — the exact same
intent, and the app interprets that as a conflict.

There's also some pretty shoddy intergration between the desktop and mobile
app. Recently, I tried talking to a colleague, and we went through all of the
above insanity, but at one point, as he was calling me, Slack on my _phone_
was ringing, but the desktop app wasn't. Some of these bugs are hard to
understand.

My company's go-to solution the last couple of years has been GoToMeeting,
which is 99% rock solid, but doesn't integrate well with anything, and doesn't
have a good mobile app. The biggest benefits to GTM are the ability to record
meetings, and the ability to dial in through a normal phone. The latter
feature has saved is a lot of times when one person has been on a bad Internet
connection.

~~~
cstejerean
Screen hero audio was wonderful for me. It felt as if you were sitting next to
the other person, even when the other person was half way around the world. I
hope the new functionality in Slack will be comparable.

------
macintux
Most unfortunate. I don't recall any other collaboration tool which has been
so dramatically better than the alternatives for such a long time.

------
giovannibajo1
When is videocalling and screensharing coming to Linux?

~~~
eikenberry
Slack's beta Linux client already supports video calling and screen sharing.

~~~
ledbettj
Does not seem to work under Wayland. You can see the mouse pointer, but the
rest of the screen is black.

Haven't tried it under X yet.

~~~
michaelmrose
Don't worry I'm sure it will work in 5 or 6 years when they get around to
implementing this functionality in some subtly incompatible way on each major
desktop environment.

Since its impossible to implement something that works across multiple
environments hopefully whichever one does the best job of providing this
feature also does a decent job of providing every other feature that
previously was able to be provided by any app.

------
kodablah
For anyone wanting to roll this themselves, it's actually quite easy with
Chrome media capture these days. Just make a Chrome extension with
desktopCapture permissions, follow the example codes to do things like
chooseDesktopMedia and webkitGetUserMedia and let them choose the desktop (or
tab). You can do what you want w/ the media stream after that (like capture to
blobs which you can send around, or send over WebRTC or whatever).

I have even successfully captured a tab to video [0]

0 - [https://github.com/cretz/chrome-screen-rec-
poc/tree/master/a...](https://github.com/cretz/chrome-screen-rec-
poc/tree/master/attempt1)

Edit: I should say screen capture, screen sharing is a different deal of
course.

~~~
faitswulff
Does this cover letting your screenshare partner take control of your
computer?

~~~
kodablah
Got my edit in just as you typed this, heh, no it doesn't. But I doubt
capturing keyboard and mouse and sending it would be that difficult. Granted
at that point I would opt for an OS native approach.

------
wferrell
The audio quality of ScreenHero has always been so great. What codec are you
using? I think I remember you saying you switched the video codec to H.264.
How did you make the audio side work so well?

------
carusooneliner
While this Slack feature is meant for live screensharing, remote teams also
need a way to record and share screencasts outside of live meetings. My
cofounder and I having faced timezone inflicted pain in remote teams before,
wanted to scratch our itch, and built a solution for anyone to easily record
and share screencasts. If you feel remote work pain, do check us out at
[https://checkoutclip.com](https://checkoutclip.com). Interested to hear
thoughts.

------
ekvintroj
Make it linux compatible!

------
weitingliu
Congrats to J & the Screenhero team! :)

------
xuanlq
Two years to do integration, which make me remember that Thread feature spent
3 years. that's why slack make things so easy to use.

------
petarb
I can't believe it took them over two years to integrate this.

------
adamnemecek
Does screehero still use 200% cpu?

~~~
binarycleric
It'll use 0% after December.

