Watching media content together with your family members is possible as most of the people have been staying at home with their family. However, it’s not possible to do so with friends in the current times because of social distancing.
If you are missing spending time with your friends watching movies and TV series, here’s a solution which is somewhat closer to spending time together. There are several tools out there which can help you watch content together and allow you to chat or talk during the session.
We are listing here five tools that can help you do so from a variety of platforms, including Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon Prime Video, etc.
Metastream
Metastream comes with support for a long list of online streaming services including Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and more. It is completely free to use and the only major drawback is that there’s no support for webcam or audio chat but there’s a chatbox using which you can text your friends.
The setup for this tool is quire easy and is available for two of the major browsers — Chrome and Firefox. As said, it’s completely free to use for anyone.
Netflix Party
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, the tool which has been talked the most for sharing Netflix screen with others has been the Netflix Party. As the name indicates, it supports Netflix for sharing but all the participants of the session will need a separate Netflix account.
The tool is complete free to use and just like Metastream, this one too lacks support for audio chat or webcam feed. But there will be a chatbox on the right-side pane to keep you connected with the other participants of the session.
Watch2Gether
This tool supports watching content from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and SoundCloud among others. It offers synchronised player for video and audio and also has an integrated chat room to talk with other participants.
It also come with webcam support and for content, it can be organised into playlists. The major highlight of this is that there’s no need to sign up for this or install any add-ons or extension as it works straight out of browser.
Scener
This is yet another tool that enable you to watch Netflix together with your friends. The feature that Scener offers which is missing in other such tools is the support for webcam as well as audio chat. So, you can keep commenting which watching a movie together with friends.
Once you have setup the service, you can share the link of a “private theatre” with other whom you want to invite for the session and to get started, they’ll also need to log-in to their Netflix account. It is available for free of cost in the form of Chrome extension.
Kast
This comes with support for platforms which are not supported by any of the above mentioned services — Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar, Zee5, and more. The drawback is that the free version is support by ads and for an ad-free experience, you need a Premium version that costs $5 or ₹375 per month.
Everyone needs to be on Windows or Mac, as Kast’s mobile versions don’t support video sharing for now. Also, given that it shared the screen of the user, quality may not be as good as what other similar tools offer.
Notable Mentions
There are several other similar tools and services available in the market. We are mentioned some of them here. Do have a look at them as well.
- TowSeven
- Vemos
- Carcal
- Facebook Watch Party
- Plex VR
