Watch Together sessions increased using peer-to-peer

Feature Suggestions
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1

My ISP upload is sometimes saturated this lockdown, even when we are all streaming identical versions of the same movie simultaneously. It’s not even possible to pre-download/sync and use this version in the Watch Together session (and some clients understandably don’t support download/sync).

Implementations already exist in webrtc, where clients help upload to other clients, for instance p2p-media-loader (GitHub - Novage/p2p-media-loader: An open-source engine for P2P streaming of live and on demand video directly in a web browser HTML page). Jellyfin also added support last year (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pull/3194). There are standalone solutions popping up too (GitHub - LucCADORET/comeover: The comeover website) but I’m a big fan of the Plex UI and would love to see this become native.

I also suspect ISPs will continue to cap residential upload for the foreseeable future to prevent hosting, and I already try my best to prevent transcoding during Watch Together since I run it on a shield, so I think P2P makes a lot of sense! A lot of my friends created accounts specifically for Watch Together, so while I realize it’s not a money making feature, it may help grow the platform.

2

As noted in our previous announcement, our existing Watch Together functionality will not be included in our new experience apps on launch, which are currently in preview and will be released broadly in the future.

As such, we’re closing related feature suggestions in order to give back those votes, so that you can vote for something else.

We do not preclude the possibility of offering similar functionality again in the future, as we also noted in our announcement. Should that happen, then feature suggestions like this one and others would certainly be considered during that development.

A new suggestion related to adding Watch Together to our new experience apps has already been raised and you’re welcome to comment or vote on that suggestion.