Facebook rolling out ‘Watch Party’, to let groups watch videos together

Facebook says it is also testing the same feature for Pages, which it will rollout soon.

Tech2 News Staff|Jul 26, 2018, 11:36:44 IST

In the past few years, Facebook has made it very clear that video holds a lot of importance for the platform. Recently, Facebook rolled out a feature called Watch Party, an experimental tool that lets members of Facebook groups watch videos together and simultaneously. The feature works with both live and pre-recorded videos.The Watch Party feature, which was launched in January this year, was available for only a few users. Until now. In a recent announcement, Facebook says that it will be bringing the feature to every group worldwide.Facebook groups have been a crucial part of the platform since its inception, and the Watch Party feature for all can work as magnet for people - holding the existing members together, and attracting some new ones too.

Using the feature is pretty simple. Once it is rolled out to you, just head to a group where you want to community watch a video. Like you would post anything else on the group wall, type in a caption for your video to gather more people to join you on the video, and there you will see a new option to ‘Add video’.You could search a specific video from the platform, re-watch an already viewed video, go through your saved video, or pick from a suggestion list that Facebook will give you. You could queue up a bunch of videos at the same time.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 also more videos as you go.Facebook has also added two new features to the Watch Party, one, that allows viewers to suggest videos, with suggestions popping up in the host’s feed for approval, and second, is for each Watch Party to have multiple co-hosts, who can add new videos to the queue.While Facebook is already in the process of rolling the feature out to Facebook Groups. The company says that it is testing the feature out to work with for Pages as well.