Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
2020’s pandemic sucked, quite frankly. But if there was a silver lining, it’s that we managed to spend a fair bit of time watching cool stuff online with our buddies. Steaming services were booming, and many were happy to allow account sharing to help us through this challenging period. Some even rolled out features to let you host online “watch parties” to fill the void of sitting together side-by-side.
Sadly, those days are increasingly behind us. Platforms have tightened the rules on password sharing, and family subscription costs are through the roof. Worse, Disney Plus silently removed its GroupWatch feature in 2023, while Amazon waved goodbye to Watch Party in 2024. You can still use workarounds like Teleparty for some services, but a Chrome extension is hardly convenient for your living room.
Streaming services no longer care that movies are most enjoyed together.
The news keeps getting worse. Plex is killing its beloved Watch Together feature as part of its revamped app design. The entire trend is more than a bit depressing; there’s certainly no harm in watching your back catalog with friends, either at home or online, for a start. But more importantly, movies and TV shows are best enjoyed in the company of others. I can understand why Plex fans are livid at the switch.
As for streaming platforms, well, they’d rather we all pay an individual subscription for every little service, obviously (which I’m not prepared to do). However, killing our enjoyment and chances to discover new favorites in the company of others is undoubtedly bad for business in the long run. In any event, the days of watching with distant friends appear to be over. Or are they?
How to use Jellyfin’s SyncPlay
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
It’s no secret that I’m a proponent of Plex’s open-source rival, Jellyfin. And guess what? It has a feature similar to Watch Together called SyncPlay. In a nutshell, SyncPlay allows anyone connected to your server to start or join groups to synchronize playback, ensuring that you’re all watching the movie at virtually the same place.
Assuming you already have a Jellyfin server set up, you’ll need to securely expose your server to the internet if you want friends and family to be able to connect to it outside of your home. Unfortunately, Jellyfin doesn’t have a simple remote access feature like Plex, as there’s no third-party server to detect your IP and pass it along to your clients.
Instead, you’ll need to manually set up a way to find your server outside your home network. There are various methods, ranging from a reverse proxy to a private VPN or using Cloudflare Tunnels. I opted for the latter, but the best solution depends on your broader setup; I can’t detail all the possibilities here, so I highly recommend Jellyfin’s official guide.
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Once you’re online, using SyncPlay is as simple as hitting the button on the app’s homepage. Either set up or join a group and then start your movie. Playback, pausing, skipping, etc., will all be automatically synchronized between everyone watching in the group.
Jellyfin’s implementation has some caveats, though. It only works on Jellyfin clients that act as web wrappers. So, while this includes Android, PC, iOS, and a couple of other apps, it excludes the all-important Android TV version (probably the one you really want!).
Jellyfin might not be quite as seamless as Plex, but it’s the best alternative.
An Android TV version with SyncPlay is supposedly in the works, but it’s been like that for years now. Transcoding can also cause things to get a little out of sync (or not load at all in some cases), so it’s best to use clients that support direct playback of your video formats.
The one downside of a free alternative to Plex is that sometimes it can take a little wrangling to make things work just how you want them. Still, if you want to keep the watch party going with your private library, it’s worth giving Jellyfin a shot.
