Facebook Wants You to Watch Videos Together With Your Friends

Live videos have been a massive hit for Facebook across all of its platform, including Instagram and its core social network. This year, the company announced it will continue to build on the success from last year, expanding its platforms to enable more real-time communication experiences across its apps.

The first feature part of Facebook’s push towards increasing live content on its platforms is Watch Party, a new Facebook feature that lets users watch a video on Facebook at the same time, together. Watch Party is an interesting addition to Facebook, especially because of the fact that it’s a feature available only to Facebook Groups. TechCrunch reports admins of a Facebook Group can only start a Watch Party, and members of the group can join the party and send reactions, add comments. There’s also a “play next” queue, where live viewers can see which video is about to pay next.

Watch Party sounds like a feature which would be a bigger hit as part of Facebook Pages, letting brands and all the meme pages start viewing parties where all their fans can join. This is also one of the features which would be a perfect fit for streaming services like Netflix, but that probably won’t happen because of conflicts related to licensing, subscriptions and pricing.

Either way, it’s only a matter of time till Watch Party makes it to Facebook Pages, Messenger chats, and regular accounts — so keep your eyes open for those if you are still using Facebook regularly.