Google today released a new iPhone app designed to let users watch YouTube videos in real-time along with their friends. Called Uptime, the free of charge download is exclusive to iOS and requires an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with iOS 10.0 or later. The app lets you interact and chat with friends while watching videos, share and curate your favorite clips, get daily video recommendations from friends and people you follow and more.
With Uptime, users can follow one another to see each other’s watch history, share interesting YouTub clips, post their reactions and more. Friends who join on the video you’re currently watching can comment, react, add stickers and so forth.
Uptime was born as a project of Google’s internal incubator program, called Area 120, which encourages employees to take 20 percent of their week to focus on side projects.
“We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend twenty percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google,” Google founders wrote in 2004. “This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner.”
The iOS-only app is available in the United States and require an invite to use. According to The Next Web, you can use the code “PIZZA” to garner an invitation for the service.