Video that explains quotes and diagnoses faults, no app to install

01The challenge

Maintenance and facilities companies kept hitting the same problems: written quotes and documents customers misread, agreements that did not match, and faults that waited for a site visit before anyone could see them. Video-conferencing tools could carry a call but gave no control of the customer's phone camera, and specialist diagnostic apps made the customer install something first, a barrier to use.

02What we did

1. 01MVP — DiagnoseIT: a link that opens a recorded video call between a customer and one or more people, with recordings to watch, download or delete
2. 02January 2022 — PresentIT, LovIt's second product: upload documents, record yourself talking through them and send a link, with sign-up, subscriptions, team seats and a back office
3. 03DiagnoseIT R&D — a camera testbed ran browser media calls across dozens of iOS and Android devices in Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and its results became one control layer for zoom, torch and camera switching
4. 04DiagnoseIT R&D — reading text in the browser made video stutter and drained batteries, so frames are captured through a hidden canvas and read on a server instead
5. 05DiagnoseIT R&D — annotations positioned with CSS drifted across screen sizes, so they moved to a canvas overlay sending normalised coordinates over WebSockets, tested under simulated latency and packet loss

03What we built

Both tools ran in the browser on the LovIt platform, which handled accounts, subscriptions and access to each product. PresentIT took PDFs, Word documents, images and video, including recordings from DiagnoseIT calls, and let the presenter highlight areas of the screen while recording.

DiagnoseIT calls could be one-to-one or group, with a silent observer for training or supervision, and every call was recorded, so the engineer going to site arrived prepared and both sides kept a copy of what was agreed. Where a phone could not support a camera feature, the control layer fell back to what it could do.

04The result

LovIt took both tools to market in 2022, built and tested with clients and offered to maintenance, facilities and property management firms. The DiagnoseIT R&D settled what had been uncertain: a mobile browser could control the customer's camera, read text from the live feed and keep annotations in step for every participant, without the customer installing anything.