Multi-Watch

Watching something with friends who aren't in the room means one of two bad options: a screen share that turns 1080p into a slideshow, or the "3, 2, 1, press play" ritual that desyncs within a minute and can never recover, because nobody knows who is ahead.

Every product that solves this properly wants an account first.

Create a room, get a six-character code, read it out loud, done. Whoever has control plays, pauses or seeks and every other player follows instantly.

Sources are YouTube (any URL format — watch?v=, youtu.be, /embed/, /shorts/, /live/, with or without a timestamp), a file you drag in, or a direct video URL.

The codes exclude 0, O, 1, I and L. Room codes get read aloud across a noisy room or typed from a screenshot, and those five characters are where every failure happens.

Identity lives in localStorage — a random ID, a display name, an avatar colour — so a refresh or ten seconds of bad Wi-Fi doesn't drop you from the room or reset your role.

Roles are host, co-host and viewer, and permission checks are enforced server-side. A viewer who disables their own UI restrictions still can't drive playback. If the host vanishes and doesn't return within a grace period, hosting hands to the longest-tenured co-host so nobody is stranded.

Sync is a continuous correction loop: each client self-checks against a host heartbeat and nudges itself back, which holds a room within about a second over long sessions through jitter and buffering stalls. Joining halfway seeks you to the right position before playback starts.

The player fits the content rather than the frame — portrait phone clips, ultrawide, square — letterboxing cleanly instead of stretching.