The problem Night's Watch Party solves

Due to the pandemic, people have been separated from their friends, family and loved ones. Being social beings, this isolation has taken a heavy toll on mental health.

One of the chief ways we used to socialise in pre-Covid times was watching movies together. And not just movies, but also sharing our own videos together,

We found this functionality to be severely sub-optimal in existing video-conference services. Sharing our screen and streaming a file from local storage takes a huge amount of bandwidth, and leads to dropping of frames. Besides, there often are bugs when sharing computer audio.

Our solution is to have an online streamed to all the members of a room, in sync with the host. This is functionality which has been implemented for streaming services such as the famous Netflix Party extension for Chrome. We wanted to extend this even further - simply provide a link to any video, and then have a watch party for it. Not just movies or web series or serials, even links to your own personal home videos, to share with friends and family and watch together. Beside the video, there is also a chat box for group communication right there in the room.

Challenges we ran into

• Time turned out to be a major constraint. Besides the hackathon, we had a lot of college assignments to deal with this weekend.
• We're beginner developers with limited experience in React. Figuring out how to get things ticking was tricky.
• Dealing with Google Drive's API is tricky, as it does not provide direct access to a shared video. We are working towards implementing that.