Back in March, Netflix, one of the most popular streaming services in the world with over 46.5 million monthly users, launched a new way to watch shows, documentaries, movies, etc. It is called Netflix Party.

Netflix Party is a new way to watch Netflix online with your friends, family, and loved ones from across the globe. It synchronizes video playback and adds a group chat to any Netflix show or film the viewer would like.

Netflix Party is a Google Chrome extension. All Netflix users have to do to be able to use this new feature is to install Netflix Party in the Chrome Web Store, click on any show, create a party, and share the URL with who they want to join the watching experience.

Netflix Party has cut down on the distance between my friends and me during this everlasting quarantine for COVID-19. Talking on Snapchat and playing video games together had been our only forms of communication during this pandemic. We missed not being able to hang out on the weekends and every day at school. Netflix Party was an easy, simple-to-use alternative.

All I did was follow the directions, shared the link with my friends, and we all watched Netflix together and had fun talking in the chat. We watched “All-American,” one of Netflix’s biggest hit TV shows right now. The chat made it more interesting to watch since we all were watching at the exact same time because of the synchronized playback without interrupting the show. 

While Netflix Party is a great additional feature to Netflix, there are a couple of downfalls. First, since it is a relatively new feature, it has a lot of bugs and lagging issues right now which I believe will be fixed. Also, the chat makes the film not full screen, which, although I did not really mind it, a couple of my friends said it made the watch less enjoyable.

Even with a couple of problems, overall, Netflix Party is a great activity to do with friends while sitting alone in quarantine. It made us feel like we were in the same room watching a TV show as we would normally do.