Facebook’s ‘Watch Party’ rolls out to all, letting Groups watch videos together

Facebook’s ‘Watch Party’ rolls out to all, letting Groups watch videos together

For the past few months, Facebook  has been testing something it calls “Watch Party”. It’s a feature that would let Facebook Groups host shared video streaming sessions, with everyone in the group being able to see/comment on the same videos at the same time. Take the Facebook Live concept and swap in a queue of pre-selected videos to make a sort of ad hoc video channel, and that’s a Watch Party.

Today the company is rolling the feature out to all Facebook Groups.

Here’s how it’ll work (screenshots borrowed from Facebook’s demo video):

1) Starting a watch party is just like posting anything else to a group’s wall. Give it a caption to catch people’s attention, maybe give it an image, and post away.

2) Add a few videos to start filling the queue

3) Once a few people have joined, the stream will start. The video will be synced up for all viewers, with hosts granted the ability to scrub back and forth in a video’s timeline. You can add more videos as you go.

For those who might’ve gotten early access to Watch Party back when it was in testing mode, they’ve added a few new features for the release:

• Viewers can suggest videos, with suggestions popping up in the host’s feed for approval (or not.)
• Each watch party can now have multiple co-hosts who can each add new videos to the queue

The feature is currently limited to Facebook Groups; the company says it’s testing support on Pages, but it’s not quite ready yet.

One other limitation to the current form: it’ll only work with videos hosted on Facebook (no YouTube, Twitter, etc), presumably due to all sorts of technical/licensing issues. (Plus, you know, competition.)

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

I’m curious to see how different Facebook Groups use this. While it’s got its intended fun uses, plopping a big audience in front of the same video with a shared comment stream always has potential to backfire — hand a bunch of people on the Internet a microphone and an audience, and things can get rowdy fast. At the very least, it’s one more thing for Facebook to try to moderate at a time when its plate is already pretty full.