Watching Together
Article • 983 Words • Media/Entertainment, 2026 • 02/25/2026
What are our options in our new media landscape to watch things together in order to share new experiences?
There are 997 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 5 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2026-02-25 00:00:00 -0500, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
I will not argue that watching things together is underrated, I think it is properly rated and that people are not ignorant to its magical powers. I think that if we think about it from the lens that relationships are about sharing life, it makes a lot of sense because you can talk about the show together, experience the same emotions, etc.
What I am interested in exploring is that we classically think of watching a movie together for a one-off or a show over time, but what are our other options in our new media landscape?
Long Form
Movies go back long before TV with the experience of going to the cinema, reveling in the spectacle with your loved ones and strangers alike. Equipped with the ability to stream movies at home, I am in a “movie club” with a group of my friends, and I frequently do double features with one of my best friends on weekends where we hang out. This works for me because I love talking during movies, something that I cannot really do in a theater.
What I like about watching movies in a club or with someone else is that we get each other out of our comfort zones to watch things that we might not have otherwise been interested in or even heard about. A real con though is that movies can be quite long and have only been getting longer. It can also be a bit of a journey trying to find something that no one in the group has watched yet. Of course rewatching is always an option, but that’s not something that I personally am open to doing in a group.
I don’t often watch shows with others as much as I do with movies, but I do have an appreciation for it because you create accountability for you both to finish the show. Of course this isn’t without its own challenges because unless it is a more regularly scheduled time together, it can be quite hard to actually finish a whole season of a show together, especially if the episodes are long and you have time constraints. If it’s anime or something else short episodes can be easier to crank out, K-Dramas and some other shows are regularly 40mins+ per episode which can be tougher to do if you have time constraints.
You don’t have to watch a whole series together to enjoy watching TV with someone, some shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Brooklyn 99 are all examples of shows where it certainly benefits you to be familiar with the characters, but that you can still enjoy it with little knowledge. Anthology shows like Black Mirror are always a great option as well.
Short and Medium Form
Sharing videos online is central to the form and there are already lots of culture around it. For instance:
“when guys show u a youtube video, u have to understand that’s a sign of great respect in their culture”
@punishedgarage on Twitter
It could be wanting to see someone’s reaction (whether good or not), or just an excuse to revisit one of their favorite videos. However rewatching videos are also a way to tap into nostalgia and create new vibes like: The Cathartic Ecstasy of ‘Gay Guy Music Video Night’.
Something that I love doing is sending TikToks to people I care about things that I think that they would like or find interesting. This is a lot of fun, but if it’s on my feed and I think someone else would like it, chances are it would be on their feed at some point as well. I think that next frontier would be allowing people to mix their personalized feeds with someone else, something that I have recently been interested in and what partially spurred this article. I recently tweeted:
“can they make a spotify blend for youtube or tiktok so that i can watch it with my friends when we hang out”
@reeshuffled on Twitter
I think that this would take some finesse to pull off because algorithms are very personal, so one person might lack the context or interest in whatever is going on in the other’s feed.
I believe that Instagram is best poised to make this change because of their feature to “Watch videos or view posts with others in a call on Instagram”, something that I am surprised to see TikTok has not copied yet. There is of course the ability to do it through FaceTime SharePlay, but I do think that this lack of feature in TikTok points at how oriented they are to being a shopping platform as opposed to a social one.
I am slightly bullish on YouTube making this change as well because I think that medium form content on YouTube could be a happy medium between the bite-sized TikToks and monolithic movies. However, I don’t think that YouTube could pull this off as it is right now because the homepage suggestions are still not good and haven’t been in forever. If they were to improve that and allow for better filtering around topic, length, tone, etc. I think that it would be a game-changer for them.
Conclusion
This article in many ways feels like two articles pasted together: my thoughts about the long-form movie-TV old guard versus online short-to-medium form new guard. However I do not think that the distinction is as hard and fast as we might initially think. TV and movie clips/serialization on TikTok or vertical dramas are trying to blur the line. YouTube creators may also shift to be longer form in order to create more interesting art or allow for more surface to create relationships with their viewers and build communities.
AI slop will come for us all and human curation and discriminating between real and fake by watching together will hopefully save us.