Facebook's "Watch Party" Expands to All Letting Groups Watch Videos Together – TechCrunch

In recent months, Facebook has been testing something that it calls "Watch Party". This is a feature that allows Facebook Groups to host shared video streaming sessions, with each member of the group able to see / comment on the same videos at the same time. Take the Facebook Live concept and exchange yourself in a queue of pre-selected videos to make it a kind of ad hoc video channel, and it's a Watch Party.

Today, the company offers this feature to all Facebook groups.

Here's how it's going to work (screenshots borrowed from the Facebook demo video):

1) Starting a watch party, it's like showing some something else on the wall of a group. Give him a caption to attract people's attention, maybe give him a picture, and post it away.

2) Add some videos to start filling the queue

3) Once a few people have joined, the flow will begin. The video will be synchronized for all viewers, and hosts will have the ability to scroll the video of a video. You can add more videos as you go.

For those who might have access to Watch Party in test mode, they added some new features:

• Spectators may suggest videos, with suggestions appearing in the stream of the 39, host for approval (or not).
• Each watch group can now have several co-hosts who can add new videos to the queue

is currently limited to Facebook groups; the company says it's testing support on Pages, but it's not quite ready yet.

Another limitation to the current form: it will only work with videos hosted on Facebook (not YouTube, Twitter, etc.), presumably kind of technical / licensing issues. (Plus, you know, the competition.)

(On this note … Hey Netflix: if you could go ahead and officially build something like that so that I could watch The Office with my wife for the 400th time I'm traveling, it would be great. )

I'm curious to see how different Facebook groups are using this. While the use is fun, there can still be a risk of turning against a large audience in front of the same video with a stream of shared comments – giving a group of people on the Internet a microphone and an audience. At the very least, it's still a thing for Facebook to try to moderate at a time when its plate is already quite full.