Less than a month after YouTube sent two popular music bots to the big digital scrapheap in the sky, Discord has reportedly begun testing official YouTube integration. The Verge says that the new feature, called Watch Together, is now available on a small number of Discord servers, and enables users to—as you might have guessed—watch YouTube videos together.
The feature was apparently in testing almost a year ago, but has been resurrected and given a new priority by Discord because of the bot shutdowns. It’s designed specifically for YouTube: Discord users can create playlists by searching for or pasting in links, and there’s also an option to let other members control the video playback. And since there’s plenty of music on YouTube, you can use it in a fashion similar to the Groovy and Rythm bots, although you may have to deal with ads blasting through the experience now and then.
Discord’s YouTube integration is reportedly only available on a very limited number of servers, but the report says testing is expected to broaden over the next few weeks and Discord hopes to open it up to everyone by the end of October. Discord unfortunately isn’t saying anything official about it at this point.
“As a company founded on innovation, we’re always experimenting and building things we believe our users will enjoy,” a Discord spokesperson said in an email to PC Gamer. “We don’t have anything more to share right now, but stay tuned.”
We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, we would once again urge you to please enjoy Discord while it’s still good.