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Sling TV is now making it easier for people in different places to watch together in virtual reality.
The live TV streaming service today confirmed it has started rolling out a new beta feature to Oculus Go headset customers called “co-watching.”
A name that’s fairly descriptive as once taken advantage of people in different locations will be able to co-watch a show, movie and even live sports together in real-time.
There are some restrictions, but not many. For example. Sling TV explains that content a user has recorded via Sling TV won’t be eligible for playback in the group setting. Likewise, neither is content that has already been started by a user and is then accessed via the “Continue Watching” feature.
In addition, each person invited to the group will also need to have an eligible Sling TV account setup and active at the time. This also means accounts need to be relatively equally as well. For example, if a host wants to watch a channel or content that’s only available through a Sling TV add-on, the other party attendees will also need to be subscribed to the add-on as well.
Lastly, no more than four people at a time can take part in the same watch party.
Other than that it seems the rest of the content on the service is available meaning users can watch pretty much anything that’s currently showing via live TV channels or choose from the TV shows and movies available on-demand.
For those who do want to take advantage of the new feature, it can be accessed by the host person choosing to ‘form a party’ using the Oculus Go headset and then inviting others to the party. Following this, when the host user launches the Sling TV app on the Oculus Go headset, the others will automatically join the same virtual room.
As well as watching together, and of course seeing the avatars of everyone else in the same room, co-watching also supports chat as well. In this sense, the new feature offers a full co-watching experience with attending watch party members able to chat to each other in real-time while watching.
Sling TV first launched its live TV app on the Oculus Go back in December, 2018 and so the added co-watching feature now highlights just how quickly the service is looking to build out its virtual reality live TV experience.
In fact, Sling TV was the first of the vMVPDs to launch its live TV app on Oculus Go, and the launch of co-watching also now makes it the first vMVPD to launch a watch-together feature like this on the same device.
This is all in spite of Sling TV being one of the most affordable vMVPDs out there. The service offers access to a variety of live TV channels from as little as $25 per month. What’s more it is often running promotions which sees the cost drop even further. For example, right now Sling TV is offering the first month for $15.