APPS SPECIAL ......THESE APPS LET YOU STREAM CONTENT WITH FAR-OFF FRIENDS

THESE APPS LET YOU STREAM CONTENT WITH FAR-OFF FRIENDS



The app lets you share real-time video, music and viewing experience, sometime with reactions

Your favourite artist dropped a new album at midnight, and you wish you could be right next to your best friend to listen to it track-by-track and chat over how great the music is. But unfortunately you are both in different places. Normally, you would think the solution is to put the phone on speaker and just have a listening party that way. But there's a better solution for that: an app -several, actually.

New communal streaming apps such as Uptime and Vertigo are making it easier to listen to music to the same beat as your jogging partner, set up a movie night with your spouse when you are long-distance, or just watch the latest viral videos with your best friends. The apps let you listen or watch content and comment in real time, even when people are on opposite sides of the world. Uptime, which was released recently, is an iOS-only video app by Google's incubator Area 120 that lets you watch and react (similar to Facebook Live reactions) on YouTube videos in real time. The app was first released in March, but it was invite-only.

Because the app has only been publicly available for a few days now, Uptime is lacking members. However, new features have been added since the initial launch that make it easier to find friends via Facebook. It also added the ability to watch music videos with friends -which is a great add-on since most people use YouTube for that. A feature it's still lacking, though, is private messaging.

A not her g r e at c om mu n a l streaming app that lets you listen to music with friends is Vertigo, which launched on iOS in November last year. Vertigo syncs up two people with their favourite music on Spotify and Apple Music. Think of it as a personalised radio station that lets friends chime in and react to the songs in real-time.

Vertigo and Uptime are not the only apps in the market that have remote streaming capabilities.Other apps and websites with the same concept include Gaze, Lisn, and Synaptop. Now, if only our favourite streaming sites such as Netflix and Hulu would jump on the bandwagon of communal streaming .

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