Earlier in the year, I wrote about Facebook’s upcoming feature called Watch Party — a new experience that lets users watch videos on Facebook together. The feature started off after the huge momentum Facebook gained with Instagram Live and even Facebook Live. Ever since then, the social network giant has been heavily focused on live video and other real-time-based interaction on its platforms.

Watch Party is a solid example of that. It’s a feature available for Facebook Groups that can let the admins or hosts start a party, and everyone else in the group can join in to watch videos surrounding a certain topic together. When Watch Party first launched, the feature was pretty limited, but Facebook is spicing things up with a new co-host feature that lets you choose other users to allow them to add videos to the party. There’s also a new crowdsourcing feature where users in the party can suggest videos to watch next.

Watch Party for Facebook Groups is just the start for the company, though. The feature is a clever way of boosting view counts of Facebook Videos, so the company is definitely benefiting a lot here. Going forward, Facebook plans on bringing Watch Party for your regular friends, so you can start watch parties without having to create an entire Facebook Group. The firm is also looking into bringing Watch Party for Facebook Pages. As for now, all Facebook Groups around the world can now use Watch Party right away.

Tagged with Facebook, Facebook Live, Watch Party