Instagram might be testing 'Watch Party' feature to let friends watch videos together

Instagram is working on adding many new features to its platform. Earlier, Instagram offered a new walkie-talkie voice messaging feature to let users speak to their friends over Instagram Direct. But one thing where Instagram may be struggling beyond imagination is IGTV, the company’s video-only platform that lets content creators share long-form videos with their audience.

IGTV is still figuring out the strategy to make inroads into the video market, which is currently dominated by YouTube. Facebook is also pushing itself too hard on turning this whole video game to their advantage for quite some time now.

Instagram might be testing a new feature to let users watch videos together. In case this doesn’t sound new to you, well, that’s because Facebook already has a Watch Party feature that allows multiple users to stream videos together, and watching Facebook integrating ‘Watch Party’ feature into Instagram would be hardly surprising.

Recently, we saw a study estimating how young Facebook users could be flocking to Instagram and Snapchat.

As a result, Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook is expected to do everything possible to make users keep coming back to new platforms like IGTV and also keep them engaged. (We won’t be surprised even if ephemeral stories come to IGTV anytime soon).

Instagram feed to get cluttered with IGTV previews and users are not happy about it

A well-known tipster and reverse-engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong has spotted co-watching feature in Instagram’s code. Wong says that the feature she has spotted in Instagram’s code is similar to Facebook’s Watch Party feature. However, this feature might be somehow related to Instagram Direct.

“Instagram is testing Co-Watching in Video Calls. It's like Facebook's Watch Party but for Instagram Direct,” Wong said in her tweet.

What to expect?

Right now, it’s too early to comment on what to expect since we are still seeking more clarity on how Instagram is going about implementing this feature into their platform. We don’t even know for sure if this feature will ever be made live or not. However, IGTV seems like an obvious guess at this point and if implemented properly, this feature would certainly give IGTV a much-needed boost in the near future.