mmhmm Composites the Presenter Into Their Slides During Video Calls

01 /The Concept

Video presentations have a persistent UX problem: the speaker is in one window, the slides are in another, and the audience has to constantly split attention between them. The in-person experience – a presenter standing in front of a screen, body language and content readable in the same frame – does not translate to the standard screen-sharing paradigm.

mmhmm solves this by compositing the presenter into the presentation. The speaker appears overlaid on slides, video clips, browser windows, or any other visual backdrop, and can resize, reposition, or fade their own image while continuing to present. It works as a layer on top of Zoom, Google Meet, and similar services rather than as a standalone conference system – and it can also produce standalone video recordings.

A notable promised feature: co-presenters can independently control the shared visual environment from separate machines, each managing effects without handing off a single screen-share control.

02 /Why It Matters

mmhmm's strategic position is worth examining carefully. By building on top of existing conference platforms rather than against them, it sidesteps the hardest problem in the space – user acquisition against entrenched network effects. Zoom's users stay on Zoom; mmhmm just makes Zoom better for the subset of users who care about presentation quality. The approach echoes Dropbox's growth during the early cloud storage era: rather than fighting for the OS-level storage layer, it became the most useful application built on top of commodity infrastructure.

The acquisition logic follows directly from this. Any conference platform competing in a crowded market faces a build-vs-buy calculation on enhanced presentation features. mmhmm's standalone value is real, but its exit optionality – being acquired by Zoom, Teams, or Webex as a feature acquisition – is a plausible outcome that shapes the competitive dynamic.

03 /Opportunities

For teams with strong technical depth, the window here is specific: presentation enhancement is one instance of a broader opportunity to improve the UX of remote interaction formats that moved online under pressure but were never redesigned for the medium.

Conference platforms are one category, but online education is a more structurally interesting one. Remote learning expanded rapidly, but the dominant experience remains a talking head in front of a webcam with a clunky LMS underneath. The moment of forced mass adoption has passed, but the interaction paradigm has barely changed. The combination of better in-session presentation tools, async review, and structured student-to-student interaction remains largely unbuilt – and the demand pressure from institutions that now need these tools is persistent rather than transient.

The competitive window for presentation-layer tools in the conference market will stay open as long as the major platforms are still deciding whether to build these features internally. That runway is probably measured in 18 to 24 months before the incumbents close the gap.