Facebook has made great strides in making video a vital part of its business over the past few months. In August 2017, the social networking site introduced Facebook Watch for watching shows and last month announced that it started testing a video gaming hub. Now, Facebook wants members of groups to watch videos together in real time.
Erin Connolly, Product Manager at Facebook, announced in a blog post the launch of Watch Party, a shared viewing video feature available now to all Facebook groups worldwide. Group members will be able to watch live or recorded videos once a Watch Party begins and engage with other members in real time during the shared viewing session.
Facebook also added two new key features to Watch Party based on feedback from groups that tried it out during the testing phase. One is called co-hosting meant to allow a Watch Party host to pick other co-hosts to add more videos and the other is crowdsourcing designed to gather video suggestions from the audience.
While Watch Party is initially launched to Facebook groups, the new feature is also set for rollout to Pages in the future while it is currently being tested with individual profiles beyond groups.
