airtime

We’re so excited to announce Airtime is live today. Over the past few years we have been heads down building, testing, iterating, exploring and working day to day to create the new Airtime. Today the world has a chance to explore Airtime with friends and family for the first time. Think about Airtime as a space where you can do everything you’d do if you were physically together — watch music videos while doing homework, check out a stack of photos and relive last night’s adventures, or just hang out. Our lightweight, high-quality group video combined with robust media integrations offers a social experience that will make you feel like you’re right there with your friends and family. All of this has been made possible by our incredibly ambitious team. We have built some of the best mobile video infrastructure around. Our implementation and extension of WebRTC delivers an amazingly good video chat experience - fast, stable, and high-quality - whether you're next door or on the other side of the planet. We can't wait for you to give Airtime a try. Invite some friends and get a room. It's seriously fun.

Wow, big relaunched, very different from Airtime's initial desktop version. Here's an interview with @sparker and @shawnfanning back in 2012 when it first launched: Great overview of the new app by TechCrunch's @joshconstine here.

Airtime's medium post goes into great detail into the thinking and history of the app. Great read. https://medium.com/airtime-blog/...

Let us know what you think!

Airtime, video chat for bored people? "The product we’re launching today is built around groups, organized in a notion we call ‘rooms’. A room can be empty or have lots of people in it. People enter and leave. Inside the room, people are engaging in all manners of entertainment — from simple text and video chat to watching movies to listening to music." I appreciate the confidence in a statement like "This is the future of social." but it feels more like a slight tweak the Snapchat stories model — multiple user on screen at the same time — than a divergent future. It's also interesting to read this swipe against Periscope and Snapchat (the former is of the "hey, look at me" model, the latter isn't real-time), but isn't the async model more convenient? "A few other companies have recently launched products that enable you to live stream to a bunch of friends and followers. That’s interesting, but it extends the hey, look at me broadcast model of older social systems. It’s way more impactful to actually experience the same moment with your friends, talk to them, and see each other’s reactions. Airtime is a hugely different and more special product." If you check out the demo, it looks like a combination of Snapchat + Hangouts + Chat Roulette: If this is the future of social, I guess it means we'll all just be staring into our phones forever, and never making eye contact IRL. Hmm.

It's finally here, and ready for you to enjoy! :)

Huge Fan of this type platform, and very intrigued to see it's competitive advantage. 🤔