Josh Hendrickson
What do friends do when they want to catch up on a show or movie together during a pandemic? Plex has a new solution for you, thanks to a new “Watch Together” feature. Invite your friends with a link, and the whole thing syncs up for you. You can watch Plex’s on-demand service or your personal media.
Watch Together is a beta feature in experimental form from Plex, and for now, it’s completely free—no Plex Pass required. Plex is quick to say “for now” on that last bit, so that could change later. It’s also somewhat barebones at the moment; you won’t find a chat feature, or video calls, or anything of the sort. You’ll have to provide your own Zoom or Google Hangouts solution.
But it works with all of Plex’s on-demand content and the media you have on a Plex Server. Just choose a movie or episode to watch, and click the “Watch Together” button to select your connected friends, or invite someone to be your friend. Plex doesn’t have a hard cap limit on the number of people who can co-watch currently, but your server may get bogged down if too many people are watching.
Anyone watching can pause or play the stream for everyone, so when Jim needs a biobreak (again), he won’t miss out, and you can grab more popcorn. You’ll find support for Watch Together on Apple platforms (iOS and tvOS), Android platforms, and Roku. Plex says it’s working on support for web streaming and other platforms for the future.
But if you have any of the supported platforms, you can start using Watch Together today. And if you’re not a Plex user, but you subscribe to Hulu, it announced a similar feature today as well.
Source: Plex
