How the sync works
Ten seconds of listening. Then the commentary knows exactly where you are.
Rowhouse is the commentary layer, not the film. The movie plays wherever you already watch it. We just deliver the person sitting next to you — locked to your frame, not to a countdown or a "press play together" handshake that drifts the moment someone pauses.
01 — The match
Hold up your phone. We listen for ten seconds.
When you join a track, the app opens your mic and captures roughly ten seconds of whatever's in the room. That's enough. We're not trying to understand the audio — we're trying to find one specific fingerprint inside it.
Every point in a film has a distinctive pattern of spectral peaks. We hash those peaks into landmarks — the same constellation-hash idea that lets a phone name a song in a noisy bar — and match your ten seconds against the film's precomputed fingerprint map. The map is dense, so the match resolves to a single moment: not "somewhere in act two," but the exact frame. Then the track snaps to it and rides your clock from there.
02 — The fingerprint map
A landmark map, built once, per film.
Before a film is listenable, we fingerprint it once into a compact map of landmarks and their timestamps. Matching is a lookup against that map — fast enough to lock in the time it takes you to get comfortable, and robust to the messy realities of a living room: TV speakers, background chatter, your phone face-up on the couch.
Because the match is anchored to content rather than to a shared timer, it survives pauses, rewinds, ad breaks, and the fact that your stream started forty seconds after your friend's. Everyone converges on the same frame from wherever they actually are.
03 — Why it's legally clean
We never record or store the film.
The mic capture is turned into a fingerprint on your device and discarded. We don't keep the audio, we don't stream the film, and we don't host a frame of it. The fingerprint map is a set of hashes — you can't reconstruct a movie from it any more than you can rebuild a face from a checksum.
That's the whole point of building the commentary layer separately: the film stays on your platform of choice, under its existing license, and Rowhouse only ever carries the conversation on top of it.
04 — The flywheel
Every live room becomes a permanent track.
A creator goes live and talks over a film in real time; the room reacts, and those reactions bake into the waveform. The moment it ends, the session is saved as an on-demand track — already synced, already searchable, reactions intact. Six months later someone holds up their phone, matches the same frame, and drops straight into that recorded room.
Live feeds the archive; the archive pulls people back to the next live show. Same sync engine driving both — the only difference is whether the host is still in the room.