While we are stuck at home, social distancing in response to the coronavirus, one thing is missing from many of our lives: hanging out with friends. There are a few ways to help ease the pain, like using Animal Crossing to connect to each other, but it’s not a substitute for just hanging out with your buds. And the legality of streaming movies straight through apps like Discord and Zoom is iffy. Luckily, Netflix has a solution for its subscribers: the Google Chrome extension Netflix Party, which allows you to virtually connect with your friends and watch Netflix together through your browser. It might just be exactly what you need right now.
Netflix Party is a simple-to-use extension that lets you watch TV and movies from Netflix with your friends, at the same time. You can catch up on what’s happening in your lives in the handy chatroom that it adds in the sidebar or riff on a movie together à la Mystery Science Theater 3000. Even if you don’t use the text chat and opt for a video or voice call using an app of your choosing, what makes Netflix Party particularly useful is the way it syncs up what you’re watching for everyone with a link. If you’ve ever tried to coordinate a virtual watch party, sometimes counting down and pressing play at the same time just doesn’t cut it.
How To Set Up Netflix Party
In this guide, we’ll walk you through exactly how to setup Netflix Party so you can start watching stuff with friends. In order to test out it out ourselves, we needed to pick out a movie to watch, and what better movie than Horse Girl, which has a very bizarre trailer. Considering “horsie movies” is already a weird inside joke with the entertainment team, why not watch this movie together? If you want something better to try it out with, check out our list of what’s new to Netflix in April.
Step 1 – Install Netflix Party
Head to the official Netflix Party website to find a link to the Chrome extension. Yes, you’ll need to be using Google Chrome to access this extension. Install it by hitting “Add to Chrome” in the Chrome Web Store.
Step 2 – Select Movie/TV Show
After Netflix Party is installed, head to Netflix and select the movie or TV show you want to play, then click the “NP” button in your browser, to the right of the address bar. From there, you can start the party and generate a specific Netflix Party URL to copy and paste to friends. You can also select whether you have exclusive access to playing, pausing, and tweaking options in the movie, or if other viewers can too. Remember, Netflix Party syncs up the movie for everyone, so if you pause the movie and you’re hosting the party, it will pause for all your friends too.
Step 3 – Enjoy!
As you can see, a chat box pops up on the right side. You can customize your chatroom name and pick from a few avatars. It is very basic, but it brings back the very nostalgic feeling of hanging out in an AOL chatroom–why didn’t any of us write “A/S/L?”
A few things to note: the person controlling the party is streaming their Netflix account to the others in the group, so there is a tiny bit of a delay, but that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things since it’s a chatroom. The only other issue with Netflix Party was finding out how to exit. There’s no button in the chat section to do this. Very quickly, we learned you just exit the movie, and that’s all you need to do. The most obvious answer is the correct one.
Netflix Party is available now, so you can add it to Chrome and all watch horsie movies together.
Netflix News
- What's New To Netflix This Week? Anime, Movies, TV, And Originals
- Netflix's Most-Watched Original In 2020 Revealed, And It's Not Tiger King
- New On Netflix In May 2020: More Movies, Anime, TV Shows, And Originals
- Leaving Netflix In May 2020: Last Chance To Watch Austin Powers, Baby
Disclosure: ViacomCBS is GameSpot’s parent company
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