Discord and YouTube are apparently entering a partnership that will add a new video-watching feature to the messaging platform. This new feature that's aptly referred to as "Watch Together" has begun rolling out to select Discord servers now to allow people to test out the opportunity to watch videos with one another. Neither Discord nor YouTube have made public acknowledgements of this new feature beyond the gradual rollout, so specifics on how this will work remain to be seen.

According to The Verge, this new feature is similar in nature to Discord's built-in option that allows people to broadcast their screens to others, a feature that avid Discord users are probably already quite familiar with. Watch Together, however, is supposedly built with YouTube in mind with options to create playlists and offer other server members the ability to control the playback of videos.

As anyone who's watched more than a few videos on YouTube may have guessed, there will also be ads incorporated into this experience. A pop-up notification shared by The Verge showed a list of tidbits to know that included the heads up that "you may also see ads during YouTube videos." Discord said in the same popup that the app was built by Discord, but it's powered by YouTube.

This feature is reportedly only being rolled out to select servers starting on Wednesday with a wider beta and release planned for the next few weeks. Because of that, there's a chance that Discord users may not see this feature available to them for a while, but Discord is supposedly aiming to have this feature launched for everyone by the end of October.

This new partnership between YouTube and Discord comes after the former shut down some popular music bots available within the messaging platform. Both Rhythm and Groovy – two of the most popular music bots on Discord – were hit with legal notices recently from YouTube which forced the services offline.

Discord has similarly been updating other parts of its platform over the past couple of months. The service's logo, for example, was updated back in May along with other assets related to the brand. In July, it was announced that Discord would be adding threads to the platform to allow people to have branching interactions within servers that didn't detract from the overall conversation going on.

Discord has not yet formally announced its plans for the new Watch Together feature.



Posted: Sep 24, 2021 5:07 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/discord-youtube-partner-new-watch-together-video-feature/