KinoDuo / About
About
KinoDuo is a synced-watching service. Several people open the same video, and pause, seek and playback speed match for everyone. Alongside it there is chat, reactions, stickers on the frame, voice and video calls, and screen sharing.
Why it exists
Watching a film together at a distance is usually suggested as a video call with screen sharing. The picture comes out murky, the sound falls apart, and before every keypress you have to count “three, two, one”. We wanted everyone to have their own video in full quality, with only the playback moment kept in step. The service grew out of that thought.
How it works
Video never passes through our servers. Each browser opens the picture itself — a file from your disk, a link or an embedded player — while the service does one thing: it keeps the position in seconds the same for everyone. Two things follow. Quality depends only on your source and your connection. And the load does not grow with the number of participants: we do not relay a stream, we broadcast a few numbers.
A room is a page with a random short code. It lives while someone is in it and disappears half an hour after the last participant leaves. A file from your device is never uploaded. The details are in the privacy policy. privacy policy.
Principles
You can watch without an account. Opening a video and sharing the pause works right away, with nothing to fill in. An account comes later and only for talking: chat, calls, stickers and screen sharing.
Nothing to install. Everything runs in the browser on a computer, a phone or a tablet — no app and no extension.
Synced watching stays free. There is a subscription, but it adds conveniences — removes ads, raises the room to sixteen people, gives an animated avatar — rather than locking away the essentials.
Who makes it
KinoDuo is made by Tokino, a developer from Almaty. It is a personal project rather than a company product: the code, the texts and the replies to your letters all come from the same pair of hands.
This is a small project: there is no team behind it, so a reply may take a day or two. On the other hand, the letters are read by the same person who writes the code — and a fix is usually not far off.
What is next
The service is alive and changing. Next in the works: accepting subscription payments, our own marks for the start and end of anime intros, and a phone app. If something is missing or broken — write to us — it genuinely helps set priorities.