How to Build a Video Portal for Your Office

Imagine looking out the window and waving at someone a continent away, like peering through a Monsters Inc. door?

It shouldn’t feel like such a crazy idea, in the age of ubiquitous Zoom and FaceTime calls. Yet those calls are purposeful, planned. You’re a bit more stiff, a bit more serious, when you know you’re on camera.

The Portal team decided to make video a bit more of an ordinary way to bridge life across countries and continents with a life-sized round screen in the middle of two cities, each with a live video feed of the other. The goal was “A network of visual bridges that transcend borders and foster connection among people living thousands of miles apart,” as the Simons Foundation wrote of the most recent New York to Dublin portal. Ideally, at least—the real world’s more messy and only a week after the Portal was installed it was disabled after “inappropriate behavior.”

But the idea’s still solid—and could be more at home in your office than on the street. What if your London office’s break room had a portal to your San Francisco headquarters? What if your factory floor and open-plan office were linked, to bring designers and makers together?

Here’s how to build a portal for your office, and make a rotating live video of your other locations a standard part of your digital signage.

Build a Basic Portal with Zoom

The easiest way to build a portal is the same way you already have video meetings. Grab a laptop, open Zoom (or another favorite video call app like Google Meet), and start a new call with someone at your other location. Leave the computer running throughout the day. Whenever someone walks by, they can peek at the other office and wave at their counterparts on the other side of the world.

You can improve on the setup, too. Zoom, by default, shows your video alongside that of the people you’re talking with. To hide your video, open your Zoom settings, click the Video tab, then check the “Hide Self View” option. That’ll keep your video hidden for every call going forward, until you uncheck the box in settings. Google Meet has a similar option: Click on your video feed’s minimize button to hide your feed for this call. Now you’ll only see your participants’ video—and with the only other party being your other office, you’ll have a full-screen view of the other side of your makeshift portal.

Now step back. Look around the other workplace. Wave at colleagues. Say hi, even—leave the audio on, loud enough to be audible while soft enough to not disturb everyone. It’s not the same as working together, but might spark conversations that you otherwise wouldn’t have had until your next company retreat.

Zoom calls can run for 45 minutes on a free plan, so you’ll need a paid plan to keep the portal going longer. Paid calls, too, are capped at 30 hours, so a Zoom-powered portal works best in small doses.

Want to make your portal more easily visible? The simplest way is to connect a laptop to the TV via HDMI. Alternatively, depending on your TV, media player, and laptop, you might be able to AirPlay or Chromecast your video to the big screen. You’ll still need the computer to be nearby, though, or would need to put a webcam on top of the TV with a long enough USB cable to connect to your computer, to keep the video stream live for your other location.

But that extra trouble is best suited for a more permanent portal—including one that you can keep running for days on end.

Build a More Advanced Portal With YouTube Live

You might like your portal enough that your team decided to dedicate a screen per office to full-time video streaming. If so, the next section is better with stretch goals for more professional video. But odds are, you don’t need video all the time. You’d like your office TVs to do double-duty as digital signage and a video portal.

YouTube Live is the easiest way to make that happen. You’ll need a device to stream video and audio at each location, a TV for the portal and signage, and ScreenCloud digital signage software to tie it all together.

Start with YouTube Live. It’s an easy way to stream live video and audio for as long as you want—for free. Create a YouTube channel if you don’t already have one, then go to YouTube Studio, click Create, then choose Go Live. If this is your first time, you’ll need to verify your phone number, then wait 24 hours for your account to be approved. You’ll need to do it twice, making an account for both locations with a video portal.

Then think about how you want to stream. You could stream from a computer. You’d need to put a webcam on top of your TV, connected via USB to either a small computer like a Mac Mini or a Mini PC powering your TV. It’d run YouTube streaming in the background, with ScreenCloud in the foreground turning your TV into signage. Or, if someone’s desk is close enough nearby, you could run a long USB cable from the TV to the computer that’s streaming to YouTube Live.

Another hardware option is to repurpose a spare, unused phone or tablet. Mount the phone landscape-orientation behind your TV, with its rear camera facing outwards right at the center of your TV (perhaps underneath your TV, if you want it to be a bit less conspicuous). That’ll only work with YouTube Live if your channel has 50 or more subscribers, though, a requirement for live streaming from a phone.

With the hardware taken care of, start your livestream. In YouTube Studio, click Create and Go Live, then add the settings for your video. When you get to Visibility options, choose Unlisted to keep others outside your firm from seeing the livestream. Then go live—at both of the offices where you want to add a Portal.

For a very minimal portal, you could open the YouTube Live link for your other location in a YouTube app on a smart TV, or Cast it with Chromecast.

A better option though is to build it into your signage. In ScreenCloud, open the Apps tab, and search for YouTube Live. Add a new instance, then paste in the YouTube Live link from your other office location. Make sure the Mute videos option is turned off. Then save your new YouTube Live instance.

You can then either set it to play on a screen in your ScreenCloud account continuously, as a full-screen portal. You could add the YouTube Live to a Playlist, so YouTube Live will show up once every few minutes, then switch back to your regular signage programming for the remainder of the time.

Or, you could add YouTube Live to a ScreenCloud channel, to split your screen between a live video portal and other important signage info including other ScreenCloud apps like Weather, important HR updates in Canvas slides, and more. If you have more locations, you could add additional live video streams to the queue, to shuffle between all of your offices throughout the day.

Either way, you want to ensure your live video shows up at the same time in both locations. Use similar playlists in each location, and make sure the timing has the YouTube Live stream show up at the same time in each place. Then set both location’s playlist or channel at the same time to make sure the content lines up.

Now, throughout the day, your signage will transform into a portal between your company’s locations, while still letting your TVs serve as digital signage to keep your team informed.

Craft a Customized Portal for Your Office

That’s not the only way to build a portal–it’s just the two easiest options.

Use Zoom Rooms at your company? You could use that as a portal, either through dedicated screens in your office rooms, or with ScreenCloud’s Zoom Rooms integration. Or, you could use ScreenCloud’s Broadcast app to stream from Zoom Rooms or with the free desktop software OBS to ScreenCloud. Both of those options would work best if running your signage from a Mac or PC mounted behind your TV, with a webcam on top of the display. OBS or Zoom would handle the streaming, with ScreenCloud showing the video on your TVs along with other signage. That could also work on a video wall, which already requires a PC to power it—add a webcam and tweak positioning enough, and it might feel like you could walk into the other office.

You could customize from there, adding plugins to OBS to detect motion—then writing scripts that would use ScreenCloud’s GraphQL API to switch signage to the video feed when people are nearby, then switching back to regular signage content later.

And you could get fancy with your hardware. Want your portal to feel like a window into your other office? A Samsung The Frame TV—or a similar styled display with wood framing around the bezel—could almost be mistaken for a window on the wall. Want to add some whimsy to your video? Add filters and backgrounds to Zoom for a bit of fun—and additional privacy for those working in the background.

The best part about your portal should be the connections it helps spark between your office locations. And, if you’re lucky, it’ll give your team more of a reason to look at your screens, fighting screen blindness along the way.

Ready to build your office video portal? Sign up for a free ScreenCloud trial, repurpose some aging webcams or phones, and hack together a portal to bridge the distance between your offices.

Image credits: Webcam photo by Emiliano Cicero via Unsplash, office photo by Redd F via Unsplash, portal header image via Portals.org