Meta announced that Quest users will soon be able to watch YouTube content inside Horizon Home, the first-party social VR space that’s finally making it easy to hang out in VR with friends.

Meta is slowly… painfully slowly… building out the core social features of its Quest series of headsets that first launched all the way back in 2019.

It was just a few months ago that Horizon Home begun allowing users to invite their friends into the Home space. And while you can watch videos together there, what’s on offer is a difficult-to-browse smattering of flat and VR-specific content hosted by Meta.

And while there’s definitely some decent content in there to share, there’s no denying that YouTube is the dominant destination for independent online video content… especially the kind of stuff that’s short and approachable enough to share with friends while sitting on the couch.

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Now it’s already technically been possible to watch YouTube in VR with friends in myriad ways. But they all require users to install a new app, and in many cases to make new avatars, or use some kind of alternate friends list or means of joining… not the simple, frictionless experience one would hope for.

But finally… finally Meta says it will be offering up the vast trove of YouTube content right inside of Horizon Home. That means to watch with your friends all you have to do is send them an invite and then hit the play button.

In an announcement from Meta Connect 2022 this week, Meta said it’s “working on with the YouTube VR team” on this project, which sounds like the new YouTube feature in Horizon Home will not only give users access to the complete library of flat content on YouTube, but also its trove of 180 and 360 content made specifically for VR.

It’s great this is finally happening, but frankly it’s an obvious use-case that’s years overdue. And how many more years until it’s just as easy to watch Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and HBO together in this space, you know, like anyone would want to be able to do in a real ‘home’.

It’s not clear exactly when the YouTube VR feature will launch in Horizon Home on Quest, but if we’re lucky perhaps we’ll see it before year’s end.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • MeowMix

    And how many more years until it’s just as easy to watch Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and HBO together in this space, you know, like anyone would want to be able to do in a real ‘home’.

    Meta gave a dev talk session regarding their Progressive Web App (PWA) push. Their Microsoft partnership integrates Quest support to their PWA-Builder platform, so this should bring over a ton of XR ready apps to the Quest platform. Dev session was called ‘Building for the Metaverse on the Web’.

    The PWA push and Microsoft PWA-Builder support might be a good enough topic for its own article.

    • Ben Lang

      PWA would be nice just to have basic streaming services in the headset, but unfortunately this doesn’t mean they could be shared in a social way; as far as I know there’s no ‘browser sharing’ in Horizon Home. To make it happen Meta probably has to have specific licensing agreements with each of the streaming platforms to allow content sharing (assuming they are re-broadcasting the content to the other participants in the room).

  • CURTROCK

    Bout freakin time! Up until now, I do this in Big Screen, which has done a really good job on implementing YouTube into their app, and their spaces are really compelling too. But their Avatars are so-so and there is friction because there is no friends list. Watching YouTube while hanging out with friends is a major use-case for spending more time in VR. This is a game changer.

  • a247slacker

    i dont think i can even invite anyone to horizon home I can teleport around to spots but how do you watch any video not youtube or invite other people ? does eveyone have this? im on the 46 version

    • Ben Lang

      Trying “invite to party” with a friend. If you have the feature then this is now the thing that invites them to your home… it’s not clear at all.

  • sfmike

    I hope they implement a cool way to share 180° 3D videos in your home space but my hopes are usually crushed.

  • JS

    What’s not “clear” is the image quality in VR. The pixels per degree need to be improved 4X before it can be a good platform for watching videos or movies. Sorry but I’m not going to watch videos through a screen door.