Streaming services have grown exponentially since the pandemic began. Part of this success is the growing number of features, while the other part involves movie releases that would have been in theaters if not for COVID-19. But watching virtually with your friends and family has always been a difficult experience. This is largely due to service restrictions that were originally put in place to prevent piracy. Luckily, Sling TV just released a new “Watch Party” feature that aims to solve this exact problem. Let’s take a quick look at it.

Watch Party is a feature in Sling TV that lets you stay connected with your friends and family remotely while watching your favorite shows and movies directly through Sling. This eliminates the need for additional third-party video conferencing services that were not only a hassle to set up but also came with issues like latency and mismatched audio. Thankfully, Watch Party helps you overcome all of these issues and provides a seamless viewing experience for you and your remote friends.

Watch Party doesn’t require significant processing power, meaning it can run on virtually any modern machine. All you need is Google Chrome, which you can install a Sling TV extension for Watch Party support. Official Sling TV guidelines only suggest Google Chrome support, but Microsoft Edge users can give it a try since it’s also based on Chromium.

Sling TV has introduced Watch Party exclusively for paying subscribers to the streaming service. This means that people you want to invite to a Watch Party will also need to be Sling TV subscribers in order to take full advantage of the feature. Thankfully, Sling is offering a one-week trial period during which you can also invite guests to your Watch Party without them needing to be Sling TV subscribers. However, this trial ends on September 30, after which you will need to subscribe to Sling TV in order to take full advantage of the new Watch Party feature.