> <i>To fight quarantine boredom I build a site to watch movies with friends.</i><p>I would call it "CoVid: watch videos together, remotely."
I love this. I still speak fondly of the early days of netlfix, when it first got into streaming on the 360. You could invite an xbox live party to watch movies on Netflix. It had a border you could enable that made it look like a theatre screen with seats, with your live avatars sitting in them, a la Mystery Science Theatre.<p>There was nothing quite like being in a chat party watching movies together. You could talk as loudly as you wanted while doing/eating what you wanted. Blew the actual theatre out of the water.<p>Really amazing experience that was killed off way too soon (greed, Netflix didn't want non subscribers to watch free).<p>Hopefully this is a road back there, definitely going to spread this around and show some $love<p>edit: not finding a donation link, but if you get a link up I'm happy to do so!
My friends and I do this through Discord. One person shares their screen playing netflix/disney/whatever and then everyone just hangs out in voice and watches together. It's a really seamless experience and the re-encoding is usually not a problem, action scenes can get a little blocky but the quality is really pretty great.
I have a 15 year old and 13 year old at home, online with their friends basically passing the time in quarantine with Zoom on all day. I literally just told my 15 year old something like this needs to exist. Showing him now... he’s going to love it.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123862" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123862</a> is great. Really, really great. No idea why it's not more widely recognized or used.
similar to netflixparty.com except:<p>- it also supports prime/youtube/vimeo<p>- it has an audio/video chat instead of a simple text chat<p>- it doesn't require a chrome extension<p>- it doesn't actually sync across the viewers? (start time, play/pause)<p>does it mean you can literally support other platforms without any integration?
Feedback: I'd like a button that advances the 'start time' to "ASAP" -- I realize you're probably doing some NTP-like time syncing between clients, and "just start right now" maybe won't have everybody synced already, but if all my friends are already in the voice chat / already on the link, there's no need to wait for the appointed time.<p><i>edit</i>: alternatively since the URLs are hard to guess, you could have the creator of the watchparty specify a "auto-start ASAP after this many people have joined" number, so once Bob and Carol have joined, it just starts.<p>Also, youtube ads are going to disrupt the synchronized start, since each person is going to see a different ad (or no ad), but I think you've said elsewhere in the thread that there's no way to get around this without requiring a browser extension.
I personally don’t like people talking when watching a movie or a TV show. It’s fine if they exclaim or laugh or gasp depending on the situation (and not being too loud), but anything that’s some kind of speech or commentary makes me lose bits of what I’m watching and want to focus on.<p>With streaming video, I can pause, rewind and then continue. But in this case, that would no longer be in sync with where the others are. The biggest advantage of streaming is being able to take breaks and continue at any point in time. I’m not sure how well this platform would work if there are many people and each one decides to take a break at a separate time (making others wait if they wish to be somewhat in sync).<p>This may work better if participants pre-decide how many breaks will be taken and approximately at what times or points.
Thank you so much for this! I will spread the word and I'm sure it'll outlive the pandemic.<p>I was waiting for someone (even Netflix) to do this the last couple of years for Valentine's day (as I realized I won't spend the time on building it myself).
Being in a long distance relationship made me realize that this would be a fun way to nurture the relationship - watching the movie together, while apart.
So my movie nights with friends used to involve watching a movie(on some streaming service or from disk), and then queuing up a bunch of random YouTube videos over Chromecast. It would be great if this wasn't tied to a single URL, but instead we could make a room and add videos to a queue to watch.
Does this require everyone to have an account for the paid services (Netflix for now)? Does this require anyone to have an account for the paid services if you happen to be able to get your hands on a Netflix URL?
There are a lot of these. A way to stand out would be to make it work with all the streaming gadgets like an Apple TV, roku stick or fire stick. Would be a killer app right now.<p>Who watches a movie sitting at their computer?
This is really interesting. A Seattle startup where I am friends with a number of the old staff: BuddyTv [0]<p>It makes me sad that the idea didn't work out and in times other than this... it still won't work out. But it's glad to know there are times when this absolutely valued.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuddyTV" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuddyTV</a>
This is on my reading / testing list earlier today: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/25/21191604/watch-movies-friends-online-netflix-hulu-youtube-party-twoseven-metastream-amazon-hbo-scener" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/25/21191604/watch-movies-fri...</a><p>Will have to add this to the list!
I couldn't get it to work. When I click "Join movie party" it just opens another tab of the party page with a timestamp in the url.<p>Also there appears to be a timezone issue? I have to input a time an hour ahead of what I actually want.
does anyone know of a good website to do this but for music? Ideally I'd love to be able to create room where buddies can join, we can chat and take turns suggesting songs to play that we all listen to. I would literally pay money for that.
This is an awesome project ... my daughters have been doing this a bit just using group-chat on their phones but I'm going to propose our small prep school has a movie night. I guess that will test it at scale ;)
You can do this in Second Life, although only for non-DRM video. There are movie theaters and big-screen TVs in the virtual world.
You can watch with your friends, and talk or text to each other over the video.
This is great, I've wanted something like this in the past! Thanks for building. I'll be giving it a try for a watch party I was planning with friends.<p>Mind sharing how it works and what stack you used?
I would love it if <a href="https://web.microsoftstream.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.microsoftstream.com/</a> could be added ( work related)
Really cool! Growing up, my friends and I spend many nights self queuing or on similar sites. Out of curiosity, what's your stack? Also, are there any plans for open source?
There are already dozens of such sites (just search for alternatives to Kast or Rabb.it), why should we use this one? Are there any advantages over competition?
I'm still wondering how people manage to get bored in today's age.<p>You have millions of journals, books, music tracks, tv shows, films and video games. You have tutorials on youtube to learn new skill, such as cooking, yoga, DIY, coding, etc. You can chat, phone or email to all your relatives and friends.<p>You can take the opportunity to produce something, write, build, create, imagine. Even without a computer you can write or draw.<p>You can take time for yourself, sleep more, meditate, rest, do things slowly.<p>Please explain it to me, I genuinely don't understand.
For those who prefer text-based entertainment, I run an email newsletter called Thinking About Things [1], which sends out a link to an interesting article every day. It's aimed at curious people who don't have a lot of time to read - each email has an extended quote from the article so that you can see if it interests you. It's gotten very good reviews from readers.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thinking-about-things.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thinking-about-things.com/</a>