Sharing and watching together

Every review, board and delivery can be reached in two different kinds of address. The general link is for showing, the personal one is for talking.

A general link carries nobody's name. Whoever opens it is asked to type one for themselves, and nothing checks it against anything. It is the address you would put in a mail to a producer who might forward it around a client's office. Because of that, it is view-only by default and only comes into being behind a deliberate tick: "A general link carries nobody's name. Whoever opens it types one for themselves and nothing checks it, so anything they say arrives from a person you cannot place, and anybody they forward it to gets in too."

A personal link belongs to one named person, listed under People with a link. It is made the moment somebody needs one, with no extra step and no extra cost. Sending it is always a separate, explicit act: pressing Email link on that person's row, or copying the address yourself. A personal link greets its owner by name the moment they open it and lets them speak with that name attached to everything they say. Revoking one person's link never touches anyone else's.

Every link can carry a passphrase, and it is always optional. The form calls it "the only thing between the link and whoever it gets forwarded to." Guessing one is rate-limited.

A link to a review or a delivery always carries an end date. You pick from four windows: three days, a week, a fortnight, or a month. There is no "never" for either of those. A board's general link is the one link in the product that may have no end date at all, because a board is often meant to sit in front of a client indefinitely.

The first thing anyone meets behind a link is a small window asking their name. It cannot be dismissed, clicked past, or closed with Escape, and it explains itself in one sentence: "Your name, so the studio knows who is looking and who is speaking. No account, and nothing else is kept."

A personal link already knows the name, so that same window greets the person and asks them to press Accept. A general link leaves the field empty and asks them to fill it in and press Continue. Either way, giving a name buys no access on its own. It means the studio knows who is in the room, and it is what lets somebody watching along speak, comment, or draw with their name on it rather than as nobody at all.

Behind a review link, a guest is shown the newest published round and nothing else. No drafts, no other rounds, no internal comments. They can comment, pin a remark to a moment in the video, draw on the frame, approve, and download the file if (and only if) you turned that on. A link that was switched to view-only hands over none of the write controls. A link with commenting switched off shows the reader only their own remarks rather than the whole conversation.

A board link can be narrower still. A studio can share the whole canvas, or only the loose material somebody put there by hand (text, images, video, titles), while every card reading live production data (a shot, a task count, a whole breakdown) leaves the server as if it were not on the board at all. Anything a studio has hidden from clients stays hidden from a share link too, unless that specific link was given the one setting that shows it anyway. That setting is off by default.

Open a review's video, and the same page a colleague is on can be watched together, live. There is no scheduled lobby or countdown. It is on the moment there is more than one person on the page, and the roster (a small panel titled WATCH TOGETHER) appears with a coloured pill per person, each colour staying stable for that person for as long as they are in the room. Your own row is marked (you); anyone from outside the studio is labelled guest.

One person at a time holds the seat: the driver, whose play, pause and scrubbing everyone else's screen follows. A small arrow marks their pill, and everyone else's picture is kept in sync with theirs a few times a second.

Anyone on the studio's side can flip a switch to take the seat at any moment. A guest can never take it themselves. They can only be given it. When a colleague is driving, every other pill on the studio's side shows a Give button. It lights up and reads Give to Anna once she has asked for it by pressing Ask for the controls. Pressing Give hands it straight over; there is no decline, and ignoring the ask is the answer. A guest who has been given the seat sees a plain In control badge rather than a switch, since letting go again is not something they can do on their own. They hand it back with Give, or the studio takes it. Whenever the seat changes hands, a small pill notice appears in the middle of the screen for a few seconds and then goes away.

Anyone following along can step out of sync at any point, scrub the clip themselves, pause on a frame, without asking. A bar appears offering to jump back to where the presentation is; pressing it, or Escape, returns you to following. Sound always starts muted for every viewer individually and is never controlled by the room; nothing about the sound is shared between viewers.

A room holds at most so many people at once: 8 on the free plan, 30 on Studio, 50 on Pro. This is a safety limit against a room running away, for every plan, not something rationed on free alone. If a room is already full, the next person to try sees a plain sentence saying so, and everything else on the page keeps working: the video, the remarks, the rounds, the approval. Only watching together waits for somebody to leave, and pressing to join again tries once more. Nobody already inside a room is ever removed, not even if the studio's plan changes while people are in it.

Your own studio's crew can always see everyone browsing a review, client included, whether or not a watch‑together session is running. A client sees nobody at all until a session is under way, and only then does everyone in that session see each other. Being seen is never the same as being able to steer. Seeing a client on the roster never lets a colleague move that client's own picture; only whoever is holding the seat can do that.

While a session is running, everyone's mouse position over the video is shared live as a small coloured cursor with a name beside it. It uses the same fractional coordinates the drawing tool uses, so a pointer lands in the same spot on the picture regardless of window size. It only appears while your browser tab is in front; a background tab sends no pointer.

If the same personal link is open in two tabs at once, the room shows two pointers carrying the same name rather than merging them into one. Two identical cursors are how you can tell that a link has been passed around.