5 Best Ways to Watch Movies and TV Shows With Friends Online

While you stay indoors to work from home, finding new ways to spend quality time with friends is no longer a challenge. Besides playing online and multiplayer games with friends, you can watch movies and TV shows simultaneously with them. Although it does require the use of workarounds, apps, and services, you and your friends can easily stream to watch the same movies and shows.

You can create virtual rooms to watch parties and invite your friends. You can text yourself in this room, decide what you want to watch, and start streaming it. The same content will be available to everyone in the room. And that’s the idea, to watch the same video stream together.

Let’s get started.

Scenes

The first group video viewing app on the list is Scener. It claims to allow users to host viewing parties for up to a million guests. Well, we had our eyes on a smaller number, like maybe 20? Scener supports popular streaming platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and Prime among others.

You can not only watch movies / shows online together, but also text and video chatting with friends. Watch your friends’ reactions in real time as the story unfolds. It would require a fast internet connection for a lag-free experience. You can use the Scener extension in the Chrome browser. This means it could work with Edge or Brave powered by Chromium.

Scener is free, but the host “reserves the right” to require viewers to pay for tickets or movie rentals from a partner service.

Visit Scener

2. Cabinet

The main difference between Kast and other monitoring apps that allow users to watch online videos together is that it is not limited to videos. Kast basically shares your browser so you can use it to share anything and not just video content. Some examples can be games or articles. It works more like a screen sharing app that works on a browser and has dedicated apps for all popular desktop and mobile platforms.

Mobile apps are read-only, so you can’t host viewing parties yet. There is a limit of 100 people per hosted room, which should be enough for most users. The Kast Base plan will only cost $ 9.99 per year and will allow sharing of animated reactions while sharing the screen. Kast Premium will set you back $ 4.99 per month, but will improve video quality, remove ads, and allow simultaneous screen and webcam sharing.

Visit Kast

3. Zoom

Millions of people know Zoom and use it for meetings and online lessons while working from home. You can get a little creative and use Zoom to stream and watch movies / shows with friends. Zoom allows you to share your computer screen while having audio / video chat with friends.

Zoom is for video and audio calls. That said, you can watch videos and stream content online with friends. As such, it has other cool features that you won’t find in dedicated video sharing apps, like the ability to record a screen, block users, or waiting rooms for guests.

The free version of Zoom allows up to 100 participants but limits the duration of the video to 40 minutes. After that you will have to start over. Think of it as a short break or an upgrade to the premium plan to remove the limits. Zoom works on all popular browsers, desktop and mobile platforms.

Visit Zoom

4. Teleparty

Formerly known as Netflix Party, Teleparty is a Chrome extension that will sync Netflix content across multiple computer screens. They must all have the extension installed with an active Netflix subscription. The process is extremely simple. Just install the extension, open Netflix, and start streaming. At the start of streaming, pause the video, click the extension to create a shareable link. Anyone who clicks on the link will join your room and watch what you’re watching.

Teleparty is free but has limited functionality. You can send text messages to yourself, but you cannot video chat. There are also no advanced security features. Well, it’s a free plugin after all.

While Teleparty started out as an add-on exclusively for Netflix, version 2.0 supports other popular streaming services like Hulu, Hotstar, HBO, etc.

Visit Teleparty

5. Syncplay

Syncplay supports many desktop operating systems such as Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. Unfortunately, mobile users cannot participate in the fun because there are no mobile apps. It does not support popular streaming services like Netflix or YouTube. So what does this support?

Instead, you can play media files stored on your local computer. However, everyone must have the file on their separate HDD / SSD to join the room. There are, however, several cloud storage and file sharing websites for downloading and sharing media files. The app is free to download and use.

Visit Syncplay

Live life in sync

These are tough times and spending time with loved ones and loved ones is important, but just as important to be safe and healthy. Watching movies and other content online with friends opens up a whole new world of possibilities. It’s as good as watching a good movie in the theater. So grab your popcorn and something to drink, relax on the couch and watch something online together.