Uptime's social YouTube viewing released invite-free

As it stands, it's a little difficult to watch a YouTube video with friends if you aren't all in the same room. Uptime, an app from Google incubator Area 120, looks to solve this exact problem, but before today, there's a solid chance you'd never heard of it. What was once an app that was an invite-only affair has now opened up to the general public, giving you the chance to watch YouTube videos alongside your friends.

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For the uninitiated, Uptime centers around one core concept: watching YouTube videos in real time with your friends. Social features are baked into most aspects of the Uptime app, from video discovery to sharing. If you missed a particular co-watching session, you can even check it out later to see the video itself along with the all reaction from your friends.

Once you and your friends are watching a video together, you can react in a few different ways. Uptime offers a set of emoji that allow you to insert a quick reaction, though you can also type out a comment if you're looking to post something a little more significant. It's a fairly simple concept that we've seen played out in a few different apps, but the main difference here is that Uptime comes from a Google-backed incubator.

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Even though Uptime has dropped the invite requirement, it isn't open to everyone just yet. For the time being, Uptime is only available on iOS, with no real information on a potential Android release. Figuring out if it will ever come to Android is a little bit difficult, mainly because Google doesn't generally share many official details on Area 120 releases.

Still, even though it's only available to a segment of smartphone users, it's always possible that we'll see Google borrow this functionality for its own YouTube app eventually. With a few different apps attempting to make YouTube co-viewing a thing, it's fairly clear that consumers want those features. For now, though, only iOS users are the lucky ones in that they'll be able to put Uptime [download] through its paces.

SOURCE: TechCrunch

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