Hi. Co-founder of Pluot, here.<p>We built Pluot because we know first-hand how much big-screen video conferencing improves the experience of working with remote colleagues. Daily standups, project meetings, and lots of other stuff gets way better when you can sit around a table, and everyone can see both camera feeds and screen shares at the same time.<p>But all the video conferencing systems on the market are too expensive for startups, or are somewhat involved set up and maintain, or didn’t have the features we wanted. So we scratched our own itch and built a little appliance, using WebRTC and atom-shell (which is now electron). Once we’d built it and showed it to some friends, we decided enough other people might want it that we kept working on it.<p>You can play with the software stack from any Chrome web browser. Go here to bounce through to a unique meeting URL, then copy that URL and send it to anyone you want to have a video call with: <a href="https://pluot.co/new" rel="nofollow">https://pluot.co/new</a><p>So far, that’s more or less like Google Hangouts. But that same video call stack runs, with a different UI, on our little Pluot device. So if you’ve got a Pluot hooked up to the TV (or two TVs) in your conference room, you can join the meeting that way.<p>The Pluot device is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu Core. We boot from the stock Ubuntu kernel, then load a bundle of Javascript that looks for the network (and walks you through configuring a wifi connection with a QR code, if there’s no ethernet cable plugged in and no previous wifi configuration). Then we pull down another bundle of Javascript that defines the basic behavior of the system. Finally, when you start a video call you’re hitting the same web stuff as in the <a href="https://pluot.co/new" rel="nofollow">https://pluot.co/new</a> link, above. But we know you’re running on our hardware, so we customize the UI for the TV screen.<p>All the WebRTC media streams are peer-to-peer. That means generally you’re going to get the best latency and encoding quality possible for whatever internet connection you’re on. The downside is that we have to do a lot of encoding/decoding -- we support four locations joining a call and two simultaneous screen-shares from participants. That’s why we’re using an Intel Core i3 instead of a cheaper ARM option.<p>Finally, it’s a lot of fun to design a unified UI that runs on big screens, laptops/desktops, and phones, and that multiple people are going to be using simultaneously for real-time interaction. You can participate in a Pluot call on a big screen or a laptop/desktop. We don’t ship with a plastic remote control, instead you use a web browser on a laptop or phone to control the big screen experience. So, lots of different pixel contexts. At the moment, we’re still working on layering in the final UI for the browser client. It’s basically still wireframes!<p>Thanks for reading this far, if you got this far. We’d love to hear the HN community’s feedback on what we’re doing. We love talking about this stuff.