Rooms and hosts
How a Global SharePlay room stays together: host controls, the ten-person cap, and the idle timeout.
A Global SharePlay room is a temporary group on one YouTube timeline. It is not a chat server, a user account, or a saved club. One person creates it, friends join with a nickname and the room ID, and the sync server holds the live state only while someone is actually using it.
If you have not started a room yet, read Getting started first. This page is about who is in charge, how big a room can get, and what disappears when everyone leaves.
Who the host is
The person who creates the room is the host. Creating means opening the extension, leaving the room ID blank, and starting the room. Everyone who joins after that is a member.
The host can approve or deny people who try to join, remove someone who is already in, and lock controls so playback is not yanked around by every participant. Those tools exist so a room stays watchable. They are not a moderation team and they are not a report system. If someone is harassing people in a room, the host should remove them, and you can also write to us from Contact.
If the host leaves, host status passes to the remaining member who joined earliest. The room does not elect a new host by nickname, and it does not wait for the original person to come back. The new host gets the same approve, remove, and lock controls.
What the room is allowed to hold
Rooms currently hold up to 10 people, including the host. The cap is a product limit, not a queue you can pay to skip. If the room is full, someone has to leave before another person can join.
Each member has a nickname and a connection status. The room also has one current video ID and one playback position. That is the shared timeline. Side conversations, YouTube comments, and playlists you did not actually switch to are not part of the room state.
Pending joins and the hold state sit alongside that. A pending join is someone the host has not accepted yet, when approval is on. A hold is the room waiting — a person still loading the right video, a YouTube ad, a large seek, or a video change — so the group does not split across two moments of the same watch.
What the server remembers
The sync server keeps this in memory for the life of the room:
- the room ID
- member nicknames and whether they are connected
- the current video ID and playback position
- host, pending-join, and hold state
There is no login. There is no persistent account table. When the room goes idle, that live state is discarded. Ordinary server logs (IP address, time, request path, error traces) may be kept for security and debugging and are rotated on a routine schedule. The full list is in the Privacy Policy.
Your browser can still remember your nickname, the last room ID, and popup state after the server has forgotten the room. That local copy is for the next time you open the extension. Clearing the extension’s storage, or uninstalling it, removes that copy.
When a room ends
After about 15 minutes without activity, everyone in the room is removed. “Without activity” means the room is not being used, not that a video happens to be paused for a moment while people are still there. An idle timeout is how we avoid abandoned rooms sitting on the server as if they were clubs.
We do not promise that a room ID stays yours forever. If the room has already been discarded, sharing the old ID will not reopen the same session. Create a new room and send a new invite. Invite links explains what that link contains and where it sends a friend.