SameCouch exists so people who can't be in the same room can still watch something together in sync - home videos, wedding and event recordings, personal creative projects, content you've purchased or licensed, and anything else you already have the legal right to view and share. It is a private screening tool between you and people you've personally added as friends, not a public content platform, streaming service, or content library of any kind.
Uploading, storing, or sharing content you do not own or do not have the legal right to distribute - including pirated movies, TV shows, or other copyrighted media - is against this policy and is solely the responsibility of the person who uploads it. SameCouch does not source, provide, index, recommend, or distribute any media content itself. Every account starts with a completely empty library; everything that ever appears in it was uploaded there by that account's own owner.
Each account gets its own, separate storage bucket, hosted on our infrastructure and never shared with any other account. When someone uploads a video, it's converted to a compatible format right in their own browser, then goes directly from their browser into their bucket - the file itself is never routed through, or temporarily held on, our application servers.
We do not provide a browsing interface, preview tool, or dashboard for looking through the contents of any account's video library, and do not review, scan, or monitor uploaded content as a matter of routine operation. That said, unlike a fully self-hosted arrangement, the underlying storage infrastructure is administered by us, which means we retain the technical capability to access stored content where necessary - for example, to investigate a report of illegal content, respond to a valid legal request, or enforce this policy.
What we also store, in our own database, is limited to account information (email, login), your friends list, and small synchronization signals used to keep everyone's playback in sync - a video's timestamp, whether it's playing or paused, and which stored file is currently selected, along with the display title of whatever is playing (so friends can see what's on without us needing access to your library). None of that reveals the actual video file.
Uploading content remains the sole responsibility of the person who uploads it, and this policy prohibits uploading anything you don't have the legal right to distribute regardless of our technical capabilities.
Adding someone as a friend lets them see your display name and, depending on the visibility you choose each time you start watching something, whether you're currently watching something and its title:
Your Videos, Photos, and Playlists libraries are never visible to friends directly - only what's actively playing in a session you've chosen to make visible to them (or, for photos, whatever you've explicitly added to a Shared Gallery).
A Shared Gallery is the one place content is shared outside of a live watch session: any member can add specific videos or photos from their own library into it, and every other member can then see and watch/view exactly those items - never anything else from that member's storage. Removing a video from a gallery only removes the shared pointer to it; removing a photo deletes it, since a gallery is a photo's only home.
If you believe a specific account is being used to store or share infringing content, or otherwise violates this policy, contact us and we will investigate and, where appropriate, suspend that account's access. Because we cannot see inside anyone's storage ourselves, reports with specific detail are the only way we can act on a concern.
We can suspend or terminate any account found to be in violation of this policy, at our discretion, with or without notice.