We just watch the same movie at home, and sit in discord for light discussion/jokes. I just count down to press play so we're all somewhat synced up. It's close enough.
Hmm sounds like a good idea for a social app that syncs the movie watching experience. If someone wants to make a toilet pause or rewatch a scene it's hard to sync again.
SyncPlay + MPV is a nice open source way to go about it, sharing time control and synchronizing playback.
With youtube-dl installed, you can also stream YouTube together as well (Google Hangouts used to be about to do this before they purged all the integration features), not just local media files. But playing from local media files though helps save a lot of bandwidth when watching with friends with limited connectivity, or in prioritizing voice/video call quality.
There's also browser extensions such as Netflix party, or mobile apps such as Rave, but the first is still buggy, and the later is a bit sketchy.
Plex also has a watch together feature, so everyone can just stream from your own media server, no exchanging files beforehand, but only supports mobile platforms so far, looks like browser or PC support is still in the works.
Discord has been the best internet voice app I've found for movie watching, as the voice activated mics and background noise suppression improves the watching experience for everyone else considerably.
Thanks for the overview of available products! It's great to hear that others saw this as a potential market as well. Google wasn't the first search website, MS office not the first word processor, Apple didn't invent the mouse. The market still seems ripe for someone to make a "proper" social media watching product, and I think there is no better moment for it than the current corona times.
My partner and I did "3, 2, 1, play" with Netflix at the start of lockdown (we don't live together). I'm surprised the big streaming companies don't do a 9pm movie equivalent to normal TV.
There's something fun about putting on the TV and knowing that friends could be watching and you could tell them to put it on or talk about it the next day. There's plenty of films I wouldn't choose to watch but would keep it on if its there.
I looked for an app like this and a few exist, but all of them fall short of meeting our needs in quality, universality, and ubiquity:
- Quality was lacking on many of them. They looked and felt like a side project from some bored dev in lockdown, probably because they were! But I wanted something polished.
- Universality wasn't there, meaning that it would work with all the big streaming services. All the ones I found were specific to a single service, provided by that service, or only worked with a handful. We watch movies from all over so it needs to support all of them.
- Ubiquity is the big one. What I mean by that is that you can use the sync service on every device. Lots of the streaming services have their own half-assed group watch feature now, but most only work on their website and not in the Apple TV or Roku or WebOS or whatever else app. We all watch our movie differently, so it really needs to be cross platform.
I'd like to see an app or web extension that basically screenshares someone's desktop, and comes with chat functionality. High quality screenshare with chat, not sure how legal this is but this would be ideal for movies or live sports (especially in these dire times).
