pult – simple fuss free internet tv
Posted: March 1, 2012 Filed under: Tech | Tags: internet tv, startups, streaming, video 7 CommentsI rarely get excited about technology these days, in fact I can’t remember the last service that launched which made me say “wow”, but Pult has done just that.
Coming out the recent Seedcamp and based in Tallinn, Estonia, the team at Pult, have created a really simple way to display video on an internet connected screen and then control it using a smart phone all without the need to install any software. At the moment the content available is somewhat limited, but it’s not the content itself that that really interests me here, its the concept and the fact that this is all done in the browser, with no apps to install and no need for devices to support protocols like Apple Airplay or DNLA.
How It Works
Navigate to the pult.io website in the browser of your large screen (internet connected TV, PC, iMac etc) and you will be presented with a 4 character code
Pult setup process
Now navigate to pult.io on your smartphone and you are presented with a different screen that allows you input the 4 characters shown on your large screen, via the connect button at the bottom.
Pult mobile device web app
And that’s it…. your phone is now connected through the magic of the internet to your large screen. So you can chose to display anything from the options presented. It’s just using websockets behind the scenes which in laymans terms means your large screen maintains an open connection to the Pult servers, so when you tell your phone what to play it tells the Pult server and they tell your large screen.
Here’s a rather dull, sorry, video here demonstrating how it works:
And Now The Interactive Part
The code showing for my laptop right now is GDPC, as shown above, which means you should be able to play something on my screen using your phones. I’ll keep it open for most of today (1st March 2012) unless I get sick of being Rick Rolled
UPDATE – My code is actually now AEQT as I closed my browser.
Mark, my words 
Mark, This is very interesting. I wonder if someone will develop a plugin for XBMC so I can use it with my Apple TV.
The fact that I can send video to you is a bit worrying though, It’s only a matter of time until someone hacks the site to present a list of live codes on pastebin or something. I reckon you should have the option of setting a 4 digit pin to complement the 4 digit code assigned to you.
The point I was making is that you don’t need to use a media centre app to do this. You could have inexpensive hardware like the £22 Raspberry Pi plugged into any TV running nothing but Chrome OS or similar and be able to stream TV without the need for installing anything. The need for expensive hardware is being completely removed by services like this and Dropbox. Doesn’t XBMC have a web browser?
WRT to security, the 4 digit code is not your code forever, they get recycled and the chance of guessing a code is pretty slim there are 36^4 possibilities = 1,679,616, increase it to 6 characters and you would be better spending your time playing the UK national lottery, as there are then almost 2.2 billion possible codes.
I’m still waiting for someone to play something to me!
Yeah I understood your point about the hardware, it gets even better when you think most TV’s have browsers built in already.
1.6 million codes aren’t that much. Get 800,000 users watching TV and you’ve already hit a 50% chance of ruining someones night. 🙂
I’ll play you a vid now….
Very true, but 800k users is a lot of concurrent users.
It’s quite strange trying to play a vid on your screen. There is no feedback on my phone to suggest it’s actually playing.
Yeah, i figure that’s not the intended use, but I thought it would be an interesting experiment.
Was it The Dictator at the Oscars?
It was indeed Dictator, I particularly like the reference to Haley Berry 🙂
It appears your experiment was a success.
BTW I randomly saw on twitter that you follow a guy called Tim Mannion, do you actually know him? He is a mate of mine (via the misses anyway)