What is Echo
Echo is the social side of Hegemon: friends, rooms and recommendations, with no accounts and no servers of ours.
Echo is the tab at the top of the home screen. It lets you recommend titles to friends, see what they recommend to you and organize rooms to watch together.
The idea#
- No account. Your identity is a random ID generated on your TV. There is no email, phone number or password.
- No server of ours. Devices talk to each other directly and over an encrypted channel. Messages and recommendations are encrypted end to end.
- Only people you choose. You add a friend with a one-time PIN, in person or by message.
What is inside#
| Part | What it is |
|---|---|
| Friends | People you add. You send and receive recommendations |
| Rooms | Groups of friends around a theme or a household, up to 5 rooms per person |
| Recommendations | A title you suggest, with a status: pending, sent or seen |
| Watch party | A scheduled session with synced playback, see Watch party. Beta |
The Echo tab#
Open Echo in the top bar. It has two sub-tabs, Friends and Rooms. Each shows rows of title cards, with the title, a short description, the ratings and the year.
| Row | What it holds |
|---|---|
| New from friends and From … | Titles your friends recommended, one row per friend. N seen shows how many people watched it |
| Sent by me | Titles you sent, with to name · Pending, Sent or Seen |
| A room's row | Titles recommended in that room. A watch party shows on its card as Scheduled for … with the host, or In progress · started … |
Select a card to open its details. Long-press for actions, such as Watch party on a room's title.
When there is nothing yet, you see Nothing yet. Movies your friends recommend appear here. or No room recommendations yet. If sync is off, the tab asks you to turn on Sync between my devices.
Before you start#
Echo uses the same private connection as device sync. Turn on Sync between my devices in Settings → Devices & sync first. See Devices and sync.
Where recommendations appear#
- The Echo tab, under New from friends.
- A Recommended by friends row on the home screen.
- The Spotlight, as Friends' picks.
Privacy#
A relay and discovery service helps your devices find each other. They see technical connection data such as IP addresses, never the content. Direct connections can reveal your IP address to the friends you connect with. See Devices and sync and Privacy and your data.