Built by students who just wanted to watch something together.

It started with a problem we couldn't solve

We were a group of college students — some of us studying abroad, some back home, some just a few hundred kilometres apart — and we wanted to do the simplest thing: watch a movie together on a Friday night.

Teleparty only worked if everyone had the same Netflix subscription. Discord screen sharing made the video blurry and the audio kept cutting. Watch2Gether was fine for YouTube but required everyone to create an account. Zoom was Zoom. None of it felt like just hitting play together on a couch.

So we built our own solution. We gave ourselves a weekend, got something working, and showed it to a few friends. We ended up using it every week after that. When we mentioned it casually online, people we'd never met started asking for the link. That was the moment we realised we weren't the only ones who'd had this problem.

What we actually built

WatchAlong.me is a free co-watching platform. You paste a video link — YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, an HLS live stream, or a direct MP4 URL — and you get a shareable room link instantly. No sign-up. No browser extension. No download.

Everyone in the room watches the same frame at the same time. If someone pauses, everyone pauses. If someone seeks, everyone seeks. The sync runs on WebSockets in real time — no drifting, no catching up.

Along the way we added things we personally wanted: built-in video chat so you don't need a separate call running, a collaborative drawing canvas you can sketch on while the video plays, chat themes so the room feels like yours, and voice notes because sometimes a reaction needs to be heard, not typed. Every feature on this platform exists because someone on the team wanted it for themselves.

Who we are

We're a small team — a handful of developers and one person whose job is just to make sure the experience feels right. We met during university, and most of us have been building things together ever since. Some of us work full-time on WatchAlong now. Some still have day jobs. All of us still use the platform on weekends.

We're based in different places — which, yes, is exactly why we needed this in the first place.

We go by the WatchAlong Team publicly because the product matters more to us than individual names. But behind every feature is a real person who got genuinely frustrated that something didn't exist, and decided to fix it.

How we think about building this

WatchAlong is free to use. It doesn't require a sign-up for basic rooms. We don't collect your viewing history or sell your data. We believe watching videos with people you care about should not require a credit card or a twelve-step account creation process.

We keep the server running through subscriptions — people who use the platform heavily and want private permanent rooms, larger capacity, and priority support. But the core experience is free, and we intend to keep it that way.

We move slowly and carefully. We'd rather ship fewer, better features than a sprawling product that doesn't do any one thing well. If something breaks, we want to know. If something is confusing, we want to hear that too.