Stay-at-home restrictions really helped drive the popularity of services that let us consume our favorite media while sharing the experience with friends. Apple users got SharePlay support on FaceTime, and Android's had access to features like Duo's live sharing mode for supported Samsung and Pixel phones. Now YouTube is trying out its own solution with an experimental feature called "live share," letting friends share videos while connected over Google Meet.
If you have a YouTube Premium subscription, you have until September 29 to try this out and host some watch parties on the YouTube app for Android. If you're interested, you just need to open the YouTube settings menu and tap the "Try new features" option. Select the “Watch YouTube together with Google Meet” experiment, and you’re good to go.
YouTube says getting started should be quite simple. You just need to initiate a Google Meet call, invite your friends, head over to YouTube, and play the video you want to enjoy together. You may see a prompt to start a live share session, so just tap the Start button to proceed. Besides just being a fun way to connect with friends we can also see the option being useful for companies, where content like training material needs to be accessed by several people simultaneously — just an easier way of making sure everyone’s on the same page.
This YouTube experiment is Android-only, but you can sign up for it on the web, too. Note that YouTube doesn’t clarify if only the host must have a Premium subscription, or if everyone on the call must be a paying subscriber. You have until September 29 to toy with this experimental feature, but we hope YouTube rolls this one out to everyone on Android once testing is complete.
Thanks: Moshe