Nearly two years ago, Meta announced that Quest’s social space, Horizon Home, would allow users to watch YouTube videos together—something we’ve been wishing was easy to do in VR for a long time. Excitement waned, however, when the feature never actually made it out the door. Now the company says social viewing for YouTube is finally ready.

It’s been possible to watch YouTube videos together with friends in VR; it just hasn’t been easy. Downloading additional apps—which often have their own accounts, avatars, and friends-lists—is a lot of hoops to jump through. Ideally the feature would just be built right into the existing YouTube VR app on Quest.

That was the plan anyway. Back in 2022, Meta announced that social viewing was coming to YouTube VR on Quest. But then it just… never happened.

Better late than never, anyway. Meta today announced… again… that YouTube VR is getting a social viewing feature. The company says users will be able to initiate a co-watching session from within the YouTube VR app, which will allow others to join you inside of your Horizon Home to watch the same content.

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At this time we don’t know for sure how many users can join the same session, but our understanding is that the social viewing feature should support not only flat YouTube videos, but also immersive 180 and 360 VR content as well.

Meta says the feature will begin rolling out next week.

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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."
  • ViRGiN

    Sign of even more ever-growing Google XR problems?

  • ApocalypseShadow

    Not bad. Should extend to all supported streaming video options.

  • Ondrej

    Apps, apps, apps for all the crap you don't need. For websites like Youtube the web browser should be enough.

    It's sad how the dark patterns from mobile world were adopted by XR, even by a company like Meta that wasn't part of that anticonsumer mobile duopoly.

    We are lucky PCs became big before the digital distribution.