Have you recently been sitting at home during the COVID pandemic and said to yourself, “Man, I wish I could watch a movie with my friends”? Well, have I got the solution for you.

Alright, sorry about the sales pitch but I really do have a solution to your problems. Recently, movie sharing services have been popping up all over the place, but many people don’t know that they exist. 

That was until after talking with freshman Aicha Beye, I learned from her that it is possible to stream movies with your friends over Zoom. I did some research on movie sharing services and found a few that might work. I have not tested them out, but the websites seemed pretty legit and will be listed below. But first here is a little bit more info on those Zoom movies.

Beye was how I learned about the Zoom call movies; it’s a pretty ingenious idea really. 

“I guess the way it works is dependent on how you’re playing/watching the movie, but the gist of it is that you and the person you’re watching with can watch a movie and talk to each other simultaneously if one of you broadcasts it on the Zoom [or I suppose it just has to be a video call that functions similarly to Zoom],” Beye said.

So basically you get a bunch of your friends on the call and one of you pulls up Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime or whatever you use to stream movies, and that person shares their screen on Zoom, and voila, a movie night with your friends. In order to watch the movie yourself, you just have to pin yourself to the screen. It’s also recommended that your friends do this, and bada bing bada boom, it’s movie time.

“It was pretty tiring on the movie-sharer’s part to get the movie to be both visible and audible to the people watching,” Beye said. “We all had to play around with our respective mics and volume controls.” 

These problems are to be expected with Zoom or any streaming service really, it takes a few adjustments to get things just right.

You may have to do some research on your own to get everything working smoothly but I do hope that this has been informational. Happy movie watching!

Movie Sharing Streaming Services:

• Netflix Party (Teleparty): “Teleparty (formerly Netflix Party) is a new way to watch TV with your friends online. Teleparty synchronizes video playback and adds group chatting to Netflix, Disney, Hulu, and HBO.”
• TwoSeven: TwoSeven supports Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Crunchyroll, Apple TV, HBO Max, Vimeo, Personal Videos, Screenshare, and much more.
• Scener: “From Netflix to Disney+, Scener supports watch parties across the most streaming services globally. All your guests need is a subscription to the service you’re watching – we handle the rest.”
• Watch2Gether: Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and Soundcloud