Facebook’s Watch Party is soon coming to Instagram

Any of us can spend hours watching videos on the internet and those hours often tend to run longer when we are watching these videos with friends. Facebook tapped on this tendency of users when it rolled out its Watch Party feature. But let’s face it, don’t we all use Instagram and not Facebook to enjoy photos and videos?

Seems like Facebook knows that too. And maybe that is the reason why the social media platform will soon be rolling out a feature similar to Watch Party on Instagram too. For those unaware, Facebook owns the photo-sharing app.

A feature called ‘Co-Watch’ could let you watch Instagram Stories, videos and IGTV content along with your friends, much like Watch Party. The feature was first spotted by reverse-engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong in Instagram Direct Messaging code. We should add here that Manchun was also the person who discovered that Facebook is testing its Dating feature before it got rolled out to a number of countries.

Coming back to Instagram, the code that has been discovered indicates that you would be able to co-watch content from suggested videos on the app or even from a playlist. However, as of now, it is not known whether features like picture-in-picture with friends would make their way to Instagram too.

It is also worth noticing that a similar feature is also being tested by Facebook on its Messenger app.

With all these moves put together, we think that Facebook is trying to create more private interactions on its platform. And needless to say, this will also help the platform boost its ad revenue.

And Watch Party has been a successful feature and Facebook has claimed that 12 million videos were viewed with Groups from July till November. Considering that Instagram’s engagement is far more than Facebook’s native platform as of now, it makes perfect sense for the company to get the feature to its photo-sharing app. And as far as Messenger is concerned, it would make the experience far more personalised, so it will be interesting to see the results.