Netflix Party: This App Lets You Watch Movies And TV Shows With Friends Remotely

These days, we've all got to practice social distancing in response to COVID-19, or the coronavirus. But we all want to hang out with our friends. We can do things like use Animal Crossing to connect to each other. We may want to watch a movie or two with friends, but the legality of streaming movies via Discord and Zoom is iffy. Luckily, with the new Chrome extension Netflix Party, you can watch Netflix movies with your buds from the safety of your own home, which is exactly what you need right now.

How To Set Up Netflix Party

Netflix Party is a simple-to-use extension, not affiliated with Netflix, that lets you watch TV and movies from Netflix with your friends, at the same time. You can catch up on what's happening in your lives in the handy chatroom that it adds in the sidebar or riff on a movie together à la Mystery Science Theater 3000. Even if you don't use the text chat and opt for a video or voice call using an app of your choosing, what makes Netflix Party particularly useful is the way it syncs up what you're watching for everyone with a link. If you've ever tried to coordinate a virtual watch party, sometimes counting down and pressing play at the same time just doesn't cut it.

In this guide, we'll walk you through exactly how to setup Netflix Party so you can start watching stuff with friends. In order to test out it out ourselves, we needed to pick out a movie to watch, and what better movie than Horse Girl, which has a very bizarre trailer. Considering "horsie movies" is already a weird inside joke with the entertainment team, why not watch this movie together? If you want something better to try it out with, check out our list of what's new to Netflix in April.

Step 1 - Install Netflix Party

Head to the official Netflix Party website to find a link to the Chrome extension. Yes, you'll need to be using Google Chrome to access this extension. Install it by hitting "Add to Chrome" in the Chrome Web Store.

Step 2 - Select Movie/TV Show

After Netflix Party is installed, head to Netflix and select the movie or TV show you want to play, then click the "NP" button in your browser, to the right of the address bar. From there, you can start the party and generate a specific Netflix Party URL to copy and paste to friends. You can also select whether you have exclusive access to playing, pausing, and tweaking options in the movie, or if other viewers can too. Remember, Netflix Party syncs up the movie for everyone, so if you pause the movie and you're hosting the party, it will pause for all your friends too.

Step 3 - Enjoy!

As you can see, a chat box pops up on the right side. You can customize your chatroom name and pick from a few avatars. It is very basic, but it brings back the very nostalgic feeling of hanging out in an AOL chatroom--why didn't any of us write "A/S/L?"

A few things to note: the person controlling the party is streaming their Netflix account to the others in the group, so there is a tiny bit of a delay, but that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things since it's a chatroom. The only other issue with Netflix Party was finding out how to exit. There's no button in the chat section to do this. Very quickly, we learned you just exit the movie, and that's all you need to do. The most obvious answer is the correct one.

Netflix Party is available now, so you can add it to Chrome and all watch horsie movies together.