The Problem:
As global internet culture becomes more pervasive, people develop similar tastes and we all end up watching the same things more and more often. But despite the fact that our tastes in movies, TV and sports are becoming more similar, these events still happen all over the world at different time zones, which will by definition lead to inconvenient start-times for anyone who wants to watch an event live/real-time.
A simple solution to this in the 90s could be the VCR or tape recording. The issue today is that second screens have become a crucial part of how we consume these events. We are texting our friends on WhatsApp when a great sports moment happens, refreshing Twitter timelines for all the funniest Oscars commentary, etc.
Not to mention that it has become increasingly unlikely to survive a few hours without spoilers with how heavily we depend on social media apps to get through the day both at work and on a personal level.
Even if you don’t care about spoilers, the current UX for going backwards in time in social media apps is bad. On messaging apps – you start with the end and scroll up to try to find the beginning. (Slack Threads are a clumsy attempt to solve this). There is no jump to start of conversation. There is no jump to when this event started at this time. #
Examples:
Assuming a person who is at GMT+2 like me, I end up waking up at crazy times to watch sports (Australian Open, NBA finals). Also true of cultural events like the Oscars.
I end up recording some of them, but often times I have to stop myself from opening WhatsApp/trying to mute words on Twitter. I re-watch NBA finals games at 8 am on League Pass and then open my twitter List of NBA follows and try to scroll down to match tweets to events in the match
The Solution – Let’s Time Travel!
The ability to time-travel inside content applications (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.)
Open app in time-travel mode. Pick a date, time, etc. Now you have two timelines: the real-world one happening now and your app timeline which you can speed up, slow down, and even pause. You can obviously jump back to the real-world clock at any moment. Ideally this would be paired with better search feature (“Go back to when this conversation started or this moment in the World Cup Final happened).
Even Netflix who have produced a version of this feature in binging, haven’t really taken it to the logical conclusion: I want to watch a movie where I can see all my friends reactions as they happened when they watched it!
A quick Google search confirms that there are plenty of extensions, apps that attempt Netflix watching together – but less that approach time travel as a feature.
Why It Might Not Work:
Might be too much of a niche use case. With sports in particular, extreme fans will just wake up to watch live vs. record.
Technical feasibility issues – maybe creating multiple timelines will end up crashing the multiverse.
Fikha's Blog 