Watch Along

See who else is watching, press play together in a watch party, and chat while you watch.

Watch Along turns a video from a solo tab into a shared room. You can see the other people watching the same video on the timeline, choose how you appear, start a watch party so a group presses play together, and chat while you watch.

In this section

Party chat covers chatting and reacting in a watch party, how you stay private while you do it, slow mode, and how to report a message.
The Room: voice, captions, and camera covers hearing the room as you arrive, taking a mic seat, the stage, camera in a private party, and the one-time age check.
The waiting room for a booked party covers the room a party booked for later opens fifteen minutes early: who is there, what is lined up, voice and chat while you wait, and what happens when the party starts or does not.
Ride along covers hopping onto someone else's watching and following them from video to video, without a party.
Follow requests covers asking to follow someone you only saw behind a mask, and choosing who gets to follow you back.

The basics

Live watchers. When other people are on the same video, small avatars ride the receipt timeline at the spot each person has reached. You are Masked by default, so the crowd is visible without your identity being on show.
How you appear. Choose Masked (a nameless disguise), Visible (your persona), or Hidden (you see everyone, no one sees you). You can change it at any time, and switching back to Masked leaves no trace of who you were.
Your mask is a little character. A Masked watcher shows a playful generated face instead of a plain dot. The face is drawn from your mask, so it stays the same everywhere you appear in a video without ever revealing who you are. In a voice party the mask's mouth moves along while you talk, on the dock speaker tiles and the stage; on the timeline it stays a calm face with a speaking glow.
Following someone you met here. Each row in the People list carries a Follow if that person is appearing as themselves, or an Ask to follow if they are Masked. Asking sends a request they can accept or decline, and Follow requests covers what each side sees.
Watch parties. Start a party on any video and the people who join follow your play, pause, and seek. Before you start, the Who can join row under the button decides the door: everyone, your followers, your friends, one of your groups, or invite only. Share the party with a link or its QR code, hand the remote around, and let Surprise us pick the next video.
You hear the party as you arrive. Voice is on when a party opens, so joining one puts you in the room with no button to find and no microphone prompt. Every mic, including yours, stays off until its owner unmutes. Leave voice in the Room stops the sound and keeps your seat.
Coming back to a party. Reloading the page, closing the tab and coming back, or wandering off to browse keep your seat. Rejoining checks the party's current audience and blocks again. A small pill says which party you are in and who you are watching with, and opens the panel again when you press it.
The party moves together. When whoever holds the remote hops to another video while you are watching, a card counts down five seconds and then takes you along. Press Follow to go at once, or Stay here to stay behind; staying keeps your seat, and a quiet You stayed behind chip waits with the way back for whenever you are ready. If you wandered off on your own, nothing ever moves you automatically; the card simply offers the way back and waits for your press.
Made for kids. Watch Along never appears on videos marked as made for kids.

Where to find it

Watch Along takes a different shape on a computer, on a phone held upright, and on a phone turned sideways. Everything below is the same room either way; only the way you reach it changes.

Open Watch Along from the Watch Along control in the row of buttons under the video. It opens as a column beside the video, with a People, Chat and Room rail across the top and a gear for My watch party. The header keeps the live count, the roster strip stays put whichever room you are in, and your own visibility control is pinned along the bottom.

To end a party you host, open My watch party and choose End the party under Ending. Canceling the confirmation returns keyboard focus to that button. After you end the party, focus stays in the Watch Along panel.

Switching rooms never drops a connection. The Room's audio keeps running while you read the chat, and the Chat pill grows a dot when a message arrives while you are elsewhere.

Hold your phone upright and the panels under the video are a row of counted pills: Receipts, then Tray and Queue when you have them, then Comments, then Watch Along at the end. The pills share one row with Play and the time before them and ⋯ after them. Tap the Watch Along pill or swipe across to it; Watchers in ⋯ takes you there too. The row steps aside while you scroll down a panel. Scroll back up and it returns, as does reaching it with a keyboard or tapping the small handle it leaves behind.

Inside, Watch Along is a row of full-height cards: Chat and Room while a party has them, then People, then You, where you set how you appear. Swipe between cards, or tap their names in the slim row under the header, which keeps the live count. Each card gets the whole panel to itself, so nothing sits squeezed under anything else. While you are on another card, the Chat tab counts the messages you have not seen, the Room tab says LIVE while your own mic is on, and the People tab carries the party count. The Room's audio keeps running whichever card you are reading.

While you are in a party and reading another panel, a Room pill sits in the band between the video's timeline and the row of panel names. It says how the Room stands: Listening once you are in it without a mic seat, Tap for sound while your browser is holding the sound back, Reconnecting if the call drops and is finding its way back, Voice on in the moment before the room reaches you and again after you leave its voice, and Voice off once the host has turned the party's voice off. One tap takes you back to the Room card. Hold a mic seat and the pill grows a microphone button that mutes and unmutes without leaving the panel you are on. When the party hops to another video, the panels under the new video open on Watch Along again as soon as it is ready, so you land with the party rather than on Receipts. Swipe to another panel before it arrives and your choice stands for that video.

Turn the phone sideways and the video goes full width. Two counted chips sit in the bar above it, Receipts and Watch Along. Tap one and its panel slides in beside the video, which keeps playing the whole time. Sideways there are no cards; the panel is one column you read top to bottom, from the live count down to You. Tap the lit chip again, or press Escape, to send it away. The Back control, the video's title and the small pill beside them, holding Surprise me and the heart, fade after about three seconds of stillness; the chips stay put so you never lose your way back.

Badges from watching together

Six badges come out of watch parties, and they are worked out from what the party record actually shows: who was in the room, who was holding the remote, and which videos a seat was confirmed onto. Nothing you press earns one, and nothing you can type into your own browser earns one either.

First Contact· Feb 2026
Plus One· Mar 2026
Party Starter· Apr 2026
Pied Piper· May 2026
Down the Rabbit Hole· Jun 2026
White Rabbit· Jul 2026

The same row a profile shows. Point at a badge to read what it was for.

First contact for joining your first party.
Plus one, Party starter and Pied piper for hosting a party that reached two, three or six people at once. People are counted once each, however many times they reconnect.
Down the rabbit hole for following a party through three videos, and White rabbit for leading five as the host. Both need somebody else in the room, so hopping through videos on your own earns neither.

A badge lands on your profile only if you were appearing as yourself when you earned it. Earn one while Masked or Hidden and it is still yours, kept privately in your account data, but your profile does not change and nobody is told which mask it was.

Mask avatar credits

The mask faces are built with DiceBear:

"Fun Emoji" avatar style by Davis Uche, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
"Big Smile" avatar style by Ashley Seo, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
"Bottts" avatar style by Pablo Stanley, free for personal and commercial use.

Invite a friend to a watch party

Open the video, click Watch Along, and click Start a watch party. The panel shows a QR code, a short vdr.fyi link, and a Copy link button. Send your friend that link and they land on a join screen, signed in or not, and press play with you.

Host a private watch party

Set Who can join before you start. Invite only takes the party off the public surface and lets in anyone holding the link. Followers, Friends and A group go further: they check every arrival at the door, so even someone with the link is turned away unless they belong, and they are the three that carry camera. Everyone is the open party, and Invite only is what a fresh picker starts on.

See when someone joins your watch party

The panel tells you as it happens: the header count goes up, the new watcher appears under Watching now with their mask name and playhead, and a screen reader hears Someone joined your party. If you are the host, the arrival also lands in your notification bell, so a party you walked away from still reaches you.

How do I watch YouTube together with friends?

Five things work today: a sync extension like Teleparty, an Activity inside a Discord call, a web room like Watch2Gether or Kosmi, a phone app like Rave, or a watch party here, where a link puts everyone on the same play, pause and seek. YouTube's own peer feature, live sharing in Google Meet, is Android only and is being withdrawn.