Hulu was first among the major streaming services to roll out a way for multiple people to watch its shows and movies together at the same time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, that Watch Party feature is expanding to all subscribers — not just those people paying for the ad-free plan.

Watch Party is available on Hulu’s website. You’ll see the icon on a title’s details page. From there, you can share a Watch Party link with up to seven other Hulu subscribers so that everyone can watch the same content together from afar. Hulu says that “while watching, group members will be able to react in real-time through the chat function and control their own playback.” If you find yourself having to pause while your friends keep watching, there’s a “click to catch up” button to get right back to the same spot as everybody else.

You can use Watch Party with “thousands” of titles from Hulu’s on-demand library, including the company’s new original rom-com film The Happiest Season, which Hulu says broke streaming records when it premiered over Thanksgiving weekend.

A number of third-party co-watch apps rose in popularity during the early quarantine phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, services like Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, Movies Anywhere, and Sling TV have begun offering their own built-in solutions.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/2/22092452/hulu-watch-party-now-available-all-subscribers