Teleparty was spawned last year during the pandemic as a way for you to watch Netflix movies together with your BFF online – in fact, the original name of the company was Netflix Party and the URL remains netflixparty.com. The company gained traction and continues to be a popular Chrome extension with barebones functionality for watching movies on Netflix together with your friends.
But apparently, this was just the beginning, per an article in Techcrunch. Now, two new startups have entered the fray: Giggl out of London and homegrown Hearo.live.
Giggl. This company is interesting on many fronts, not the least of which is if you say the company’s name enough times, you may end up saying Google instead of Giggl. We’re trying hard on new jokes folks, but it’s a midsummer haze. Anyways, Giggl was founded a year ago by 4 teenagers in London. Craft Ventures funded $2.2 million in the company’s seed round, and it has around 20,000 users. The company boasts a service which allows for ‘multiplayer browsing’: a multiplayer space for chatting, browsing and hanging out on the Web with your friends.
They want to use the funding to build out their own custom server infrastructure probably similar to the Discord style to reduce costs and increase speed. The demo that the company’s 19-year-old Chief Product Officer Tony Zog did on Jason Calcanis’ Launch accelerator program is here for your viewing pleasure.
Hearo.live. The other upstart in the space was founded by Ned Lerner, a 13-year veteran director of engineering with Sony Worldwide Studios and which is backed by 500 Startups. They’ve got 300,000 downloads of their app and 60,000 actively monthly users, a good start. The scope of the app is limited to watching movies together, and the company has created some neat audio tricks to enhance sound quality experience during your watch parties.
Even Apple is in on this with their recently released feature called SharePlay in iOS 15. The circus ringmaster, aka Senior VP of Engineering Craig Federighi unveiled the feature as something new and earth shattering during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference back in June. Unsurprisingly, SharePlay lets users watch video or listen to music together and chat while on FaceTime, and wait for it, even browse apps and share screens together.
It remains to be seen whether this is going to be something that sticks beyond the pandemic-fueled trend that Netflix Party seems to have inspired.
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