Facebook Expands Group Video Watch Party Feature To Everyone

Facebook already has a huge library of videos, ranging from family antics to video game streams and, yes, even viral cat videos. The social media giant on Wednesday rolled out a feature it had been testing for months to everyone: the ability to watch videos simultaneously with friends via the new Watch Party feature.

For the moment, Watch Party is relegated to Facebook Groups, but could extend to regular friends and members of the same pages somewhere down the line, according to a company blog post. All users need to do is hit the “Watch Party” button on a group page and queue up a list of videos or livestreams to watch.

After that, they can invite other users from the group to join what is essentially a chatroom underneath whatever videos they are all watching at the same time. Another way to think of it is like the chat function that already exists for Facebook Live videos, but for pre-recorded videos, too.

Facebook posted a tutorial video showing roughly how it works on Tuesday.

Facebook has been testing the Watch Party feature out for much of 2018, but the new rollout extended it to everyone. The biggest hangup for Watch Party, as it exists right now, is that groups of users can only watch videos hosted on Facebook together. If people want to get together and remotely watch YouTube videos or Netflix content at the same time, they need to use a different service, like Rabb.it.

The company has doubled down on its efforts to get people watching more videos in recent months. Just this year, Facebook launched a video game livestreaming hub and a series of original, fully funded news programs from outlets like Mic and CNN. The reason, of course, is that ad revenue from videos is highly sought after by digital publishers.

Given that any user can upload or stream directly to Facebook, the site has to heavily moderate that content. Several million pieces of violent or offensive content have been removed from the site in 2018, according to CNN Money, with a great deal of those automatically flagged as such by Facebook’s AI. If the goal is to get people watching more videos, the videos need to be safe to watch.