Family, friends and classmates can come together to watch or listen to BBC content through a new experiment from BBC R&D.
BBC Together is part of the BBC Taster platform where the BBC tests out new ideas and technologies.
The premise is to select video and audio content from iPlayer, Sounds, Bitesize, News and Sport and watch it at exactly the same time as others in your peer group.
Once a programme has been chosen, the host is given a link to share with the small group of friends, family or others that they’d like to join the session. The host just needs to press play to get it started, and can also pause, rewind and skip forward or choose a different programme for everyone to watch at once, all in sync with one another
Dr Libby Miller, senior R&D producer at BBC R&D, says: “We wanted to see if technology could bring people together to watch and listen to BBC shows remotely as a shared experience, which we’ve done with BBC Together. It’s important to say that it’s just a test at this stage – and we’ll be monitoring how well it works and thinking about how we could change it in the future, but we’re looking forward to seeing and hearing about the creative ways that people use it and getting their feedback on Taster.”
A third party application, Netflix Party, has a variation on the theme. Netflix Party synchronizes video playback and adds group chat to the show. It claims 100,000 people use the service.
