Comparing Couch Potato to Hulu Watch Party
If you have a no-ads Premium account on Hulu, then you may know they recently rolled out a new feature called Watch Party, which allows users to watch the same content while messaging each other in the chat room aligned to the side of the screen. Sound familiar? We thought so, too. I’ll be discussing the similarities and differences between our app, Couch Potato, and Hulu’s Watch Party throughout this post.
The main similarity between the two are their basic function: both allow Hulu users to watch the same movie or TV shows while chatting with each other. Visually, the two are also very similar, with the chat room positioned on the right side of the screen and a dark gray and black color scheme. When building our application, we used the dark colors purposefully to blend in with Hulu’s video player and be unobtrusive to our users, and it seems like Hulu had the same thought. However, other than visual similarities and basic function, these two applications are surprisingly different!
One big difference between Couch Potato and Hulu Watch Party is that Watch Party is only available to subscribers who pay for the no-ads version. In 2019, Senior VP Peter Naylor stated that around 70% of Hulu users do not pay the extra $6 for removed ads, so this is a huge chunk of users missing out on Watch Party! In contrast, Couch Potato is available to all Hulu users with or without ads as long as they have our extension downloaded from the Chrome store. On top of that, Hulu Watch Party currently allows up to 8 people in one party, while Couch Potato allows access to unlimited people. If you can find more than 8 people who want to watch the same thing and who don’t pay $11.99 for the premium membership, then Couch Potato is definitely your best bet!
As a team, the Couch Potato feature we’re most proud of is our synchronized play/pause functionality. When one user pauses their show or movie, the content on everyone else’s screens is paused as well. Users get a message in the chat to say who paused the video and at what timestamp, and once that user clicks play the video will start again for everyone. We were very surprised to see Hulu did not include this feature because, honestly, what’s the point of watching something together if one person misses out every time they want a snack?
Watch Party is also missing a few crucial features that, in our humble opinion, bring Couch Potato to life. One is the ability to choose an avatar to represent you while in the chat room. The pizza slice, wine glass, dinosaur, and narwhal are some favorites, but the list goes on. We allow our users to choose their name for a session, while Watch Party grabs the name on the account. I mean, that makes sense, but if sometimes you want to be Tina Belcher for a day, is that so wrong? The last feature I’ll mention is our Drinking Game feature, which allows any user in the chat to send a blinking message calling all people on the couch to drink. We tested this by watching Too Cute, the puppy show on Hulu. Anytime you see a cute puppy, drink! You could use this feature for any show with a little imagination.
We were extremely excited to find out that Hulu rolled out Watch Party after working so hard on building Couch Potato. It proved to us that we created something useful, something that Hulu found valuable enough to build into their own site. But we were concerned that it also made our extension obsolete. While Hulu Watch Party still has the ability to surpass Couch Potato as the preferred group watch technology, we’re proud to say that it hasn’t just yet! And we have some plans in the works to make sure that it never does.
In the meantime, stay tuned for our next post where we’ll talk about our transition to working remotely at coding bootcamp and completing this entire Capstone project from home!
Interested in learning more about Couch Potato? Start this blog series from the beginning! And don’t forget to download Couch Potato from the Chrome store so you can start watching shows with friends now!
