When we set out to build TwoSeven in 2015, a service named ‘Rabbit’ was very much still around. Rabbit employed a browser on a Virtual Machine in the cloud which all participants connected to, to watch videos together. Why then, did we build yet another service, despite all our well-meaning friends telling us that we already had a big competitor in this space?

We built it for ourselves, primarily for one reason: video quality. In today’s 4K world, we didn’t want to compromise on video quality while sharing the experience of watching together. Especially when we knew that we didn’t have to.

TwoSeven has since grown beyond its original purpose of personal use to watch Game of Thrones together when we were in a long-distance relationship. We take pride in the fact that we’ve been able to provide you all with the same high-quality video co-watching experience that we once wanted.

Given this, you might be wondering (and rightly so) how screen-share on TwoSeven aligns with our objective of watching together in full quality. The short answer – it doesn’t. The slightly longer answer – our screen-share feature wasn’t built to enable watching videos together!

Update (2020-03-26): If you’re on v2.1.5.2 or greater, you don’t have to follow these instructions. If you’re still having trouble accessing Netflix on TwoSeven, get in touch with us!

Recently, Netflix marked a couple of cookies with an additional flag: SameSite=Lax. This innocent-looking change completely broke the TwoSeven extension’s ability to embed Netflix.

You will need extension version v2.1.5 or greater to get Netflix to work. This version is already available on Firefox and Chrome. This post discusses cookies, how they work, recent changes to their behavior, and finally, what you need to do to get Netflix to work on TwoSeven.

This update caters to our patrons who support us and ensure that twoseven continues to be available as a free service for you and everyone else. We are truly grateful for their support and take this opportunity to thank them.

If you would like to support the work we do on twoseven, and also unlock some cool new features while you’re at it, do consider becoming a patron.

Here’s a sample:

update: As of 2019-11-09 Hulu is available to all tiered patrons ($5 and above).

Access to Hulu is currently restricted to patrons as part of their early-access privilege. However, to ensure that patrons are able to watch Hulu with their friends, any room that has a patron at any point will have Hulu unlocked for the lifetime of that room.

In addition to Hulu, this update brings a few minor changes. Here’s the full list:

• Added support for early-access features for Patrons
• text-chat: Now supports typing notifications
• room: Fixed invite-list shrinking when selecting many friends

UPDATE 2019-07-18: We’re having some issues with getting the extension published on Chrome. The features described below will be available once your extension updates to v2.3.1 or above.

We’ve been working on a lot of new features and improvements over the past couple of months, and the time has finally come to package them all up and roll it out as an update. There were things that made the cut, and a few that got left out for a future release. In this post, we’ll be discussing the ones that did make the cut.

Here’s a full list of changes. We’ve described the bigger changes below:

• MPEG-DASH
  • Preliminary support
  • Does not work with copy-protected (DRM) streams
• Added support for Plex (experimental)
  • Does not support Direct Play at the moment
• Now works with vrv.co (experimental)
• Framework to support more third-party websites (webpage-framing)
  • Added support for Shudder using webpage-framing
• Improved sync logic for uploaded captions
• Fixed login issues

We understand and appreciate the feedback you’ve been providing, and are striving to make TwoSeven more friendly and safe for you to use. When we first built TwoSeven, it was only used by me and my husband—and we would always have our webcam and mic enabled. The way we saw it, adding additional clicks to enable webcam or mic were a waste of time. In other words, a lot of our initial design decisions were made based on the way we used TwoSeven.

We take your privacy very seriously and have made the following changes:

1. Webcam and mic will no longer automatically turn on when you join a page
2. You can choose to turn on your mic without sharing your webcam video
3. No big, black box when there’s no webcam video

We have a minor update rolling out today with a few small features and a bunch of bugfixes. Most importantly, webcam video volume is now properly controllable across different browsers.

Here’s the most important list of changes:

• Fixed webcam volume control
  • Works on Chrome despite an age-old bug. Separate blog post on the workaround.
  • If anyone’s facing issues with controlling the other person’s webcam volume, let us know
• No longer requires both webcam and mic permissions for non-text chat
  • Video/Voice chat should now work independent of the other
• Added ability to load custom captions on web & personal videos
  • Currently supports srt, vtt, ssa, ass formats
  • Only synchronizes to clients that are already in the room
    • New clients will need to load the captions themselves
    • Will add support for this in the future
  • Even though other users receive and initialize the captions, they may still have to manually enable closed captions on the video
• Optimizations to chat component
  • Should get rid of some lagginess on slower PCs/laptops
  • Known issue where rapid messages will stop auto-scroll
• Added list of patrons

TL;DR: Avatar and nickname can now be changed, Extension now on Firefox, Performance improvements, bugfixes, etc.

Since the start of 2019, we’ve been working hard on developing new features and improving the styling of twoseven.xyz. While some of these features will go unnoticed by the end-user, they are nonetheless important technical milestones. We will list out all of the updates, describe why they were important and if applicable, how they will impact you, the user.

Version 2.0.0 involves significant changes to the way in which the extension operates. A large number of features were added and certain existing features were improved or optimized. To make full use of these features, the extension requires you to provide additional permissions.

In return, you get the ability to watch:

• Videos from any* website together
• Videos from Amazon Prime
• Interactive movies like Netflix’s Bandersnatch

If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read Part-1 of the history.

In this post, I will be talking about Netflix synchronization in particular, delving into some technical detail where necessary.