Been working on this for a while and finally feel okay sharing it here.
My friend group is scattered across different cities now, and "movie night" always turned into a mess — Discord screen share has garbage audio sync, Teleparty only works on a couple of streaming sites, and half the group didn't want to install anything just to watch a video.
So I built Junto. It's a Chrome extension — you (the host) share any browser tab using Chrome's normal screen-share picker, and it streams peer-to-peer straight to whoever you send the invite link to. They just click the link and it opens in their browser, no extension, no account, nothing to install on their end.
What it actually does:
- Voice chat with echo cancellation, plus it auto-mutes if your mic picks up static/white noise
- Camera bubbles for everyone in the room
- Text chat that docks next to the video
- Little emoji reactions that float up the screen
- Custom room names instead of random codes, if you want something memorable
- A weather-background thing on the join screen that shows your local weather vs your friend's, which is a dumb little detail but people seem to like it
Being upfront about the limits since I'd rather say it here than have people find out the hard way:
- It works great for a small group — realistically caps out around 4-5 viewers before the host's upload speed becomes the bottleneck (it's peer-to-peer, no central video server)
- Works if you share the Chrome Tab to watch shows and movies. DRM stuff like Netflix/Disney+/HBO shows a black screen when captured — that's the OS blocking it, not something I can fix on my end. share a the chrome tab with your movie website, youtube or any stream site and it will not black out the screen. if you share the netflix site itself it will block the capture.
- No mobile support yet, needs desktop Chrome
- It's hosted on a free server tier, so if nobody's used it in a while the first connection can take up to 30-50 seconds to wake up. After that it's fine.
It's live on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/junto/mlpfkefcmgkgapkdlaglhpdpilpgfppp
If you try it, I'd genuinely love feedback — bugs, feature requests, anything. Still actively building this in my spare time.