In my mind, there are two excellent ways to start a watch party with your friends: Teleparty or Discord. They’re both great, full of features, and easy to use—but what’s the best option of all?

5

Price: Which is Cheaper?

Right out of the gate, both Teleparty and Discord get a point for being completely free. Teleparty is a simple plugin, while Discord can be used from your browser or downloaded and installed as a standalone program. I recommend installing Discord to avoid any complications you may have with screen-sharing over a browser.

With that said, both Discord and Teleparty also offer subscriptions.

Teleparty Premium will give you the essentials for hosting a watch party—full-screen viewing, real-time chat, video syncing, and 1080p resolution—but if you want to video or voice chat, that’s an additional $4 a month. Additionally, everyone needs to subscribe to whatever streaming service you’re all watching on.

Discord, on the other hand, doesn’t have that kind of limitation. You can stream what you want, and everyone can turn on their webcams and chat. Most importantly, only one person needs a subscription to a streaming service. However, the person streaming content will be limited to 720p, unless you have the more expensive Discord Nitro subscription, which is $10 a month.

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4

Streaming Service Compatibility

What may be a thorn in your side (and your friends’) is that Teleparty isn’t compatible with every streaming service, whereas Discord works with virtually any. However, Discord can be a little touchy, but luckily, you can fix screen-sharing problems in Discord fairly quickly. It’s mostly hardware acceleration that causes problems, which you’ll need to disable in Discord and your browser; otherwise, you’ll just see a black screen.

Teleparty does it differently. Its free version supports a handful of streaming services. The good news is that it’s mostly popular platforms, like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Prime Video, Max, and YouTube. There’s also support for Spotify, Pluto TV, and Tubi. If you want to get together and watch something on Crunchyroll and Apple TV, you’ll need Teleparty Premium. Same goes with Paramount+, Peacock, ESPN+, and STAR+.

Additionally, Teleparty is available as a plugin for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, and as an Android app. Discord, on the other hand, works in browsers, on PC, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.

3

Setting Up Your Watch Party

While neither is by any means hard to get a watch party going, Teleparty is, without a doubt, easier than Discord. With Discord, everyone needs to create an account, set up a server, make friends, and then start streaming. It may take you anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes to get started initially.

Starting a watch party using Teleparty is a little more streamlined. After it’s installed, you create an account, select a streaming platform, and then find something to watch. You’ll then see the option to start a Teleparty. The plugin automatically puts you into a room, and also provides a link (in the top right) to share with your friends and family.

2

User Experience

In the grand scheme of things, Discord isn’t difficult to use; it has a small difficulty curve. But as I’ve said, Teleparty has very little friction between you and your watch party. Although Discord is great for getting people together for games and even workplaces, it’s a multipurpose platform. Teleparty’s singular purpose offers a better overall user experience.

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This is especially true when it comes to conversing with your friends and family. Teleparty is broken up into two parts—the video and the chat log on the right. Discord has a server list, chat, the stream itself, and a lot of icons and other features. It looks way too busy to someone who has never used it before.

1

Discord vs. Teleparty: The Winner

Picking Teleparty or Discord wasn’t as cut-and-dry as I was hoping. Both are perfectly suited for hosting watch parties with your friends, but Teleparty has an edge over Discord. Ultimately, Teleparty’s user experience is much easier to pick up and use. And although it has limitations on which streaming services are supported and everybody needing a streaming subscription of their own, I found that to be a non-issue most of the time.

For starters, how often do people not have a streaming subscription? Secondly, Teleparty supports most popular streaming services for free, and the free option provides everything you need to get started. Getting to stream content at 1080p also becomes more useful when your watch party is enjoying, say, a modern movie.

I still recommend Discord if you and your friends don’t fall into any of those categories, even though it’s a better tool for gamers. On the rare chance it’s just you (or a friend) who has a streaming subscription? Go with Discord. Is everyone subscribed to a service that Teleparty doesn’t support, even with Teleparty Premium? You won’t run into that issue with Discord.