Watch Parties is a new social viewing experience by Twitch that lets creators and viewers enjoy … [+]
Movie night just got an upgrade. Twitch said Thursday it’s rolling out its Watch Parties beta to a larger audience after a few months of limited testing – meaning creators and their viewers can now enjoy select Amazon Prime movies and TV shows together while stuck in quarantine.
Watch Parties, a new social viewing experience, is still in development, and to start, the feature is only open to Twitch partners in the U.S. (all parties must have an active Amazon Prime memberships; Twitch, of course, is a subsidiary of Amazon). Watch Parties will be available to all creators in the U.S. in the coming weeks. The company plans to open Watch Parties worldwide over the coming months.
Twitch, a live video-game-streaming site that’s becoming increasingly mainstream, started testing Watch Parties with a small group of creators back in October, it said. With most of the world stuck at home, it decided to open the beta more broadly.
“During this time of uncertainty, we know how valuable shared experiences like Watch Parties are,” the company said in a blog post. “We want to thank our community for helping us improve the Watch Parties experience.”
The current version of Watch Parties includes roughly 75 movies and TV shows that were “requested by the community,” Twitch said, including Amazon originals like Jack Ryan, Hunters and Troop Zero as well as community favorites like Star Trek, Survivor and Psych (here is a complete list available as of today). Twitch said it expects to expand and include the entire Prime Video SVOD catalog this year.
Twitch has made a number of upgrades to Watch Parties already: it’s added a picture-by-picture format above the chat so viewers can see and hear all. Twitch has also enabled subs and bits so viewers can cheer or subscribe like they would during a normal stream. Raids, squad streams and ads, reversely, are disabled.
Currently, Watch Parties are only supported on desktop via Mozilla Firefox or Chrome.