There are plenty of sites and tools for watching for watching together

Netflix Party (browser extension): Syncs netflix

SyncLounge (webapp): Syncs plex

twoseven.xyz: Create a room and play Youtube, Netflix, Prime Videos, Hulu, or really any <video> on any website with the extension

Tuturu.tv / Caracal.club: Gives you a VM in the cloud where you can play any video and watch together. Good when you have only a single netflix/hbo account or whatever. You're guaranteed to have a single view and can share control.

SyncPlay: An plugin for VLC/MPC that syncs local files

There are many more, andchill.tv for Youtube, Kast, and so on. Zoom is probably the last solution i'd use for this.

There's a similar (and similarly-named) syncing plugin for Disney Plus:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disney-plus-party/...

I can understand wanting to avoid bad press given the current state of things, but even still I'm shocked that Netflix and especially Disney haven't hit these with C&Ds for trademark use given the obvious potential for confusion.

Netflix Party at least has existed for years. I used it at least 4 years ago if not longer. What surprises me is that none of these sites have made a built-in version of this feature.

Well, and that's exactly the source of the confusion. I was sent a "Netflix Party" link recently and sure enough, it was a regular Netflix.com URL that loaded and played the movie we were planning to watch. I had no idea until I was told that I needed to switch to Chrome and install a browser extension before it would actually do the synchronized play.

If it was "Watch Together" or something, it would immediately clue me in that there was something else I was going to need to install or sign up for in order to make it work.

Regarding discoverability, can't Chrome extensions register themselves to handle custom schemas? If Netflix Party gave you a party://netflix/movie-id/session-id URL, then it would fail to resolve on a machine without the plugin installed, while still not requiring any centralized infrastructure.

https://parsecgaming.com/ is made to play local-multiplayer games remotely. It is like screensharing, but it forwards controller inputs as well at super low latency.

Are there any games that you've found work particularly well this way?

All of the jackbox games should work. My friends and I played Drawful 2 (which is free right now [0]) over Zoom and it worked great.

[0] https://www.jackboxgames.com/

Check out this online implementation of Codenames I made with a friend:

http://gamecraft.live/

We played https://skribbl.io which was really fun!