It looks like Disney Plus has now discontinued its GroupWatch feature. Disney launched GroupWatch during the pandemic as a way for subscribers to watch movies and shows remotely with friends and family.
Similar to the remote-watching features offered by many other streaming services, a Disney Plus subscriber could initiate a GroupWatch session by navigating to a title, clicking on the GroupWatch icon, and inviting other Disney Plus subscribers to the watch party.
While the company has not officially announced discontinuation of support yet, Disney appears to have now removed GroupWatch functionality from the Disney Plus website and mobile apps, making it impossible to begin a watch party.
Even though this could be just a bug or a temporary removal, it looks like Disney has also started removing documentation about GroupWatch from its website and Help Center. For example, the main GroupWatch page now redirects to the Disney Plus homepage, while the GroupWatch on Disney+ support page now redirects to the main Help Center page.
While it currently remains unclear exactly when the feature was removed, the documentation pages appear to have been updated (in this case, removed) within the past week, so we are assuming that’s also when the support was beginning to disappear in general.
Likewise, app documentation has also recently been updated to reflect the change. For example, screenshots from Apple’s App Store now show the iPhone interface without the GroupWatch logo.
After checking, we found the GroupWatch logo was still in use on App Store images as recently as September 15, 2023.
The screenshots on the Google Play Store have also been updated to remove the GroupWatch logo, although we were unable to confirm how recently that change happened.
Either way, with the functionality having disappeared recently, and the supported documentation also now disappearing, it seems highly likely that the feature is in the process of being discontinued.
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