Watch together
Create or join
One person opens an episode or a video, clicks the extension, and presses Create a room. The popup shows a six-character code. Everyone else clicks the extension, types the code, and presses Join room. If they are on a different episode, the popup offers one button that takes them to the right one.
During the show
- Anyone can play, pause, or seek. Everyone follows.
- Only the room leader changes episodes. The leader is whoever created the room; if they leave, the person who has been in the room longest takes over.
- If someone buffers, the room pauses and the popup says who. Resume is a manual press by anyone, on purpose: automatic resume thrashes.
- The participant rail sits beside the player, also in fullscreen. Cameras that are on show live video; otherwise you see initials.
- Mic is on when you join. Camera is off until you turn it on.
- Voice ducking lowers the show while you speak. It is off by default and lives on the setup page; with speakers, the show itself keeps triggering it.
How many people?
There is no fixed limit. The call is the constraint: everyone sends their voice, and their camera if it is on, directly to every other person, so each person's upload grows with the size of the room.
| People | Upload per person, voice only | Upload per person, all cameras on |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 0.03 Mbps | 0.6 Mbps |
| 4 | 0.1 Mbps | 1.9 Mbps |
| 6 | 0.16 Mbps | 3.2 Mbps |
| 8 | 0.22 Mbps | 4.4 Mbps |
| 10 | 0.29 Mbps | 5.5 Mbps |
Download is about the same. Each camera that is on costs every other person roughly 0.6 Mbps each way.
- Up to 6 with cameras on works comfortably on most home connections.
- Bigger groups: keep cameras off. Voice alone stays small even at 10.
- Uploads are the limit. Many home plans upload far less than they download, so check yours before a big camera-on night. Older laptops also feel it sooner: every stream is encoded separately for each person.
These figures come from a test of up to 10 people with every camera on and no network limits, so they show what the call asks for, not what a slow connection can deliver.
Google Drive
Drive works a little differently from a subscription service, because there is no subscription: there is one file, and everyone opens it from their own Google account.
- Share the file with everyone first. View access is enough. Someone the file was never shared with cannot open it, and the room cannot help them.
- Drive limits how many people can stream one file at once. If someone sees "Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time", that is Drive's own quota, not the extension and not your connection. It clears by itself, but there is no way to hurry it — worth knowing before a big night rather than during one.
- If someone lands on "Unable to load video", they are probably signed in to more than one Google account, and Chrome opened the link under the wrong one. A Drive link with no account in it always opens under the first account. Opening the file's own URL directly fixes it. The Go to episode button in the popup has the same limitation, for the same reason: the account order is different on every computer, so there is no single link the room can hand out that is right for everyone in it.
- Nothing plays next. Drive plays one file and stops, so a room on Drive never wanders off on its own the way an autoplaying episode can.
Wix Video
Wix sites show video in a player that Wix serves from its own address and embeds in the site's page. The extension works inside that player and never touches the rest of the site.
- The participant rail sits inside the video player, beside the video, rather than beside the whole page. The site around it is left as it is.
- Go to episode opens the video player on its own, full-window, rather than the site's page it came from.
- Everyone needs access to the video on the site, just as they would to watch it alone.
- Nothing plays next. At the end the player goes back to its cover and stays on the same video.
Leaving
Press Leave room. Your microphone and camera are released immediately. Closing the tab does the same.
Ad-supported plans
Ad breaks land at different points for each viewer, and the extension does not skip, hide, mute, or shorten them. The room drifts during a break and re-converges after it. That is expected.