AniDachi

Inspiration

Watching anime with friends who live in other cities meant counting down "3, 2, 1, play", drifting out of sync within minutes, and juggling a separate Discord call on top of the stream. Most watch-party tools were built for Netflix, not for anime fans on Crunchyroll.

What it does

AniDachi turns any Crunchyroll, YouTube or Netflix episode into a shared watchroom. Start a room, send the invite link, and everyone's playback stays in sync, so pausing, seeking or skipping the opening happens for the whole group at once.

On-video chat and emoji reactions
Built-in voice and video calls with resizable, movable cameras
Automatic anime title detection
Saved watch progress so your group can resume next time (Plus/Pro)
Friends join free; hosting needs Plus or Pro (3-day free trial)

How we built it

AniDachi is a Chrome extension plus a web app. The extension hooks into each platform's video player to share play, pause and seek events through a real-time sync service, and draws the chat, reactions and camera overlay on top of the video. Each viewer keeps using their own streaming account.

Challenges we ran into

Every streaming site handles its player, ads and episode transitions differently, so keeping playback in sync across buffering, ads and "next episode" jumps took a lot of per-platform work.