A few hours ago, Facebook announced that they’re launching a new interactive feature called “Watch Party”, which is a new way for people to watch videos on Facebook together in real time.

Watch Party feature enables Facebook users to host a party video in Facebook groups and invite the group members to participate. When Watch party is started, participants can watch videos, live or recorded, and interact with one another at the same moment.

“We’ve been focused on building new ways to bring people together around video, create connections, and ignite conversations; Watch Party is the next step in bringing this vision to life.”

A few months ago, Facebook started testing this new feature by making it available only for some groups on its platform in order to assess Watch party as a new feature and review their feedback, helping them to improve it.

Today, the company announces rolling out the feature to all Facebook groups around the globe.

How Facebook Watch Party works?

• Tap watch party button to get your watch party started.
• Choose which videos you want to add to your watch party.
• Invite friends and watch together.
• Viewers can comment and react while the host adds videos to the watch queue and controls playback.
• Viewers can suggest videos, with suggestions popping up in the host’s feed for approval (or not.).

Based on the feedback from the Watch Party test group, Facebook is adding two new features to using watch party, which are:

• Co-hosting, which lets the host of a Watch Party designate other co-hosts who can add videos and keep the party going.
• Crowdsourcing, which lets anyone in a Watch Party suggest videos for the host to add to the Watch Party.

Facebook also pointed out that they’re now working on testing the ability for people to start Watch Parties with friends outside of groups, in addition to exploring Watch Parties for Pages in the future.

“We believe that if people can start a Watch Party directly from their profile or from a video they’re watching, the experience of watching video on Facebook can become even more fun and social.”