They tried a scheduled after-hours happy our with the whole company, but people showed up for a few weeks and then it died off.
We have Discord and have a few channels including #general and #random. We haven't found the need to get more specific since there's only a few of us. It might be nice to have those specific ones shared with the entire company instead of just the team, though. I think I'll suggest that.
The photography one in particular caught my attention because a few people on the team wanted to do a flat-lay photo contest with a prize, but CS just wasn't into it. We're still considering doing it unofficially.
Thanks for the info!
How does this work? You guys meet up in person?
With youtube-dl installed, you can also stream YouTube together as well (Google Hangouts used to be about to do this before they purged all the integration features), not just local media files. But playing from local media files though helps save a lot of bandwidth when watching with friends with limited connectivity, or in prioritizing voice/video call quality.
There's also browser extensions such as Netflix party, or mobile apps such as Rave, but the first is still buggy, and the later is a bit sketchy.
Plex also has a watch together feature, so everyone can just stream from your own media server, no exchanging files beforehand, but only supports mobile platforms so far, looks like browser or PC support is still in the works.
Discord has been the best internet voice app I've found for movie watching, as the voice activated mics and background noise suppression improves the watching experience for everyone else considerably.
Anyone else have suggestions?
There's something fun about putting on the TV and knowing that friends could be watching and you could tell them to put it on or talk about it the next day. There's plenty of films I wouldn't choose to watch but would keep it on if its there.
- Quality was lacking on many of them. They looked and felt like a side project from some bored dev in lockdown, probably because they were! But I wanted something polished.
- Universality wasn't there, meaning that it would work with all the big streaming services. All the ones I found were specific to a single service, provided by that service, or only worked with a handful. We watch movies from all over so it needs to support all of them.
- Ubiquity is the big one. What I mean by that is that you can use the sync service on every device. Lots of the streaming services have their own half-assed group watch feature now, but most only work on their website and not in the Apple TV or Roku or WebOS or whatever else app. We all watch our movie differently, so it really needs to be cross platform.
- Use Slack for water cooler talk, but not just "on brand" links like articles about software. Make or join a #videogames, #movies, #music, and/or #photography channel and talk with people outside your team. If it makes sense, some of these hobby channels can have little activities or contests. Our photography channel runs an inconsistently updated photography "contest", but mostly we just share our favorite shots and talk about gear we can't afford.
- Have a team happy hour about once every other week, during company time. We do ours on a Friday, just after 1pm for me (central time). It's late enough that many people are ready to relax a bit before the weekend but early enough to let the people on the west coast join. Just grab a drink (hard or soft) and talk about stuff!
- Do activities after hours with coworkers, if they're open to it. I run a bi-weekly movie night (on weeks we don't have the happy hour) and invite everyone on the team to come. Frankly, it's usually only a couple regulars, but those that come seem to enjoy it and it's really improved team camaraderie. On some nights we switch it for a game night. Among Us is a newer game that is absolutely perfect for this.