iPhone: Your favorite 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 freak out over how great the music is, but unfortunately you're both in different places. Normally, you'd 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're long-distance, or just watch the latest viral videos with your best friends. These apps both 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 publicly Monday, 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. (Though it wasn't necessarily hard to get an invite, since the password was "PIZZA.")
Because the app has only been publicly available for four days, Uptime is lacking members. However, new features have been added since the initial launch that make it easier to find friends via Facebook. Uptime 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.
Another great communal streaming app that lets you listen to music with friends is Vertigo , which launched on iOS in November 2016. Vertigo syncs up two people with their favorite music on Spotify and Apple Music. Think of it as a personalized radio station that lets friends chime in and react to the songs in real-time.
Since the app supports the two most popular streaming sites, it's easy to listen to anything from Prince to Taylor Swift. You can use this to practice a dance routine, work out at the gym with your buddies, or simply share a song with your significant other.
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 favorite streaming sites such as Netflix and Hulu would jump on the bandwagon of communal streaming.
Share This Post
