Tech
Twitch Watch Party lets streamers watch Prime Video with their fans
It's rolling out now.
Twitch is rolling out its new Watch Parties feature to all streamers in the U.S. over the next few weeks. Watch Parties allows streamers to watch Prime Video movies and TV shows with their viewers who also have active Prime accounts. The feature was announced in October of last year.
“Watch Parties brings Prime Video to Twitch,” the company said at the time. “You can watch a selection of Prime Video movies and TV shows on your channel with any of your viewers who have Prime, including the new season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and Pokémon.”
Watch Parties is limited to "over 70" titles from Prime Video for now, but Twitch plans to add the entire catalog by the end of 2020. There's still a lot of good content in there right now, though, like my personal favorite, Spongebob Squarepants.
Staying connected under COVID-19 — The feature represents yet another way to connect with others as the world remains socially isolated under stay-at-home orders intended to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Many have been using a similar service to watch Netflix with their friends, aptly called Netflix Party. That's not an official product from Netflix, however, but a browser plug-in that streams a piece of content on all of your computers simultaneously while running video chat. It's kind of surprising that Netflix hasn't productized this yet considering Netflix Party's popularity.
As Input's Editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky wrote recently, opinions on the tech industry have turned quite sour in recent years. But the pandemic we're facing right now would have been much less bearable without the internet and all these tools like Watch Parties that are keeping us connected with our loved ones. We're grateful for that.
Twitch will expand Watch Parties to other countries in the coming months.
