This is a very important feature to me and I think Plex devs should keep it around. It’s very important to me that I use this picture to watch movies and TV series with my significant other, she’s staying in another city. I hope Plex devs can keep it around for real.
I paid not for important features to be removed.
Pease please please DO NOT get rid of the Watch Together feature!! It is quite literally the main feature I use on Plex, and certainly my favorite. I’m a Plex Pass holder and frankly without this feature, Plex has far less value to me. It is essential, especially in uncertain times; this is one of the few ways people still have to connect & spend time with our loved ones who are far away. I implore you, please keep this very important feature.
A app upgrade should not remove features that had been advertised and brought a lot of people to the platform, Plex used to be about the community, now it’s more about corporate partnerships, I’m very sad that one of my favorite softwares and from the very few that I actually preferred to pay and show value in it turned to be like this.
Don’t kill Watch Together! PLEASE! Nobody cares about a new version. I’ve happily been a paid subscriber for many years now, I use Watch Together all the time to stay connected to friends that are far away. It’s horrible you’re cutting this feature. I don’t need some new UI - do NOT launch the new version until you add this feature back in.
We indeed used Watch Together fewer during the last years, but not because we don’t want to, but because it was broken (OPUS transcode bug and skip back bug) and Plex didn’t fix it.
So instead of fixing that feature they just kill it?
Please restore Watch Together in Plex Experience (and fix it)!
I just want to add that I neither support nor understand the decision to remove watch together. But I most certainly appreciate the forewarning so that I can block updates to plex to ensure that I can keep using it instead of whatever garbage and completely unnecessary redesign is under works that absolutely no one wants or asked for.
removing a great feature for no reason. I didnt care it was glitchy and a bit crap, just let me use it, as its simpler dealing with its issues than explaining to non tech users how to get other systems in place.
Very disappointed. Don’t want/need new apps, would much rather keep this.
Anyone got easy alternatives that works across platforms?
We need this feature before you roll out the new redesign or I’ll have to use the web application and block updates
I use this all the time with my partner and friends.
It would be great if it also supported watching multiple tv episodes and music, but it is still so useful to stay connected with people that live in different places.
As a lifetime Plex Pass user, I’m becoming more convinced that moving to another service might be worth all the effort…
I use this feature regularly and am extremely annoyed at this decision, watch-together is one of the main reasons I use Plex instead of any of the many competitors.
The web app is not usable on certain platforms due to hardware accelerated video decoding in the web-browser not being implemented, so if I’m understanding correctly this is effectively removing the feature entirely for users who rely on the desktop app for hardware accelerated video playback as the new “Plex experience” interface will replace the existing desktop apps.
-1
Get rid of watch together and don’t add it to the new Plex Experience. We’ll just all use Jellyfin instead as the only (free!) competitor with a watch together feature.
Let’s use this as an opportunity to switch a free and open-source alternative that actually cares about what the users want.
+1 I am disappointed that Plex is prioritizing social media and third-party content over maintaining existing features like Downloads and Watch Together.
Have been gearing up and getting excited to use Plex specifically to watch together with my kids when they move away.
Plex you just pulled away the football. Please put it back. This is family. This is precious time “together”.
Lying on my back in the dirt,
Charlie
Please don’t remove one of your best features. I may cancel my subscription over this.
This, I’d be totally fine with adding it to PleX pass, but don’t remove it! 
Same thought here, have been eyeing this for that exact scenario! 
If they can’t provide this feature in the new apps, don’t launch the new apps. People need to start focusing their anger on what is causing this, the re-design meant to push more people to their ad-supported content.
Demand they drop the app redesign.
Lifetime Plex user here, this must be the WORST decision I have ever seen. Bring this feature at least back on the roadmap, I will be pausing updates and if this will not be fixed, I will move away from plex.
This is absolutely and utterly uncalled for and insane to think that such an important, DEFINING FEATURE of Plex, is going to be going away.
I started out using Plex over any of the ‘competition’. Then, one day they removed Feature X, then Feature Y, then Feature Z… It was horrible when they removed the photo backup feature… it allowed me to share my photos with my entire family… ENTIRE FAMILY… I hosted hundreds of thousands of photos for my family… and then it just ninja vanished… Then they broke hardware encoding, and then they broke ‘pausing’ videos… then they broke Watch Together… after that, I jumped ship to Jellyfin which had a Watch Together feature. It was a pain in the ass to use, but at least it WORKED… Then, Jellyfin nuked themselves and prevented tens of thousands of users from being able to access their own content, so I jumped BACK to Plex, giving it a shot to see if they fixed anything… which thankfully, they did. None of the features came back, but they at least fixed the pausing issues and the Watch Together issues…
I fully switched back to Plex at that point, and even doubled down on a lifetime pass just so that my family and friends could all watch movies together during events and conventions and such… it was so nice.
Now… You’re going to just straight up REMOVE the Watch Together COMPLETELY from the App… but leave it in the absolute abomination that is the Web App? Which barely functions for anything that isn’t 1080p SDR or lower? What’s the point of watching a movie now if i’m forced to take a beautiful 4k HDR movie, and encode it down to 1080p SDR just to be able to watch it with friends and family?
This is an absolutely horrible and stupid thing to do… Guess I’ll be swapping everything back to JellyFin again to see if they fixed any of their bs now. God this is so stupid… being forced to flip flop between two systems on a near yearly freaking basis just to maintain the features that you’ve grown accustomed to and use on a near daily basis…
You can really see the ‘corporate heads’ overstepping here… making decisions and changes that no one but them thinks is ‘good’… “Management” needs to remember what “Management” means… managing the company and its resources… not dictating things outside of their comprehension and forcing ‘their’ beliefs and opinions onto others…
And yes, I get that they are ‘making a new app’… but this is a freaking CORE FEATURE of Plex… the entire REASON so many people use it… If you can’t implement this simple feature, then don’t bother making a new app!
And and, YES… This is a SIMPLE FEATURE… A friend was able to code this EXACT feature from SCRATCH in a matter of minutes (before AI was even a thing) so that we could keep a TV Show that we all wanted to watch, in sync. We each had the episode, and we’d all launch his app, and just drag the file we wanted to watch over to it. It would constantly send ‘pings’ to everyone on a timed basis, and based on the responses, would be able to dynamically adjust everyone’s video to stay in sync. The accuracy was nearly spot freaking on, depending on your ping. but later he was even able to take that into account too by finding out what everyone’s ‘ping’ was to eachother, and was able to predict where in the video everyone else would be in conjunction with you…
If someone can do this in their spare time in minutes, an entire TEAM of PAID DEVELOPERS should, without a flipping doubt, be capable of doing this exact same thing… Heck it could possibly be even EASIER since the content is all local to the server, so you are already getting the latency aspect ‘learned’ by simply streaming in the first place… you already know right when the packets are arriving, and the receiver can just relay back that it received it, and thus use the round trip time to ‘adjust’ things…
Keeping such a stupid simple feature in the ‘new app’ should be a no brainer… making this feel almost like a rug pull… yank the feature away, then mysteriously return it outa no where as a ‘SURPRISE! WE BROUGHT IT BACK!’… we’re not children… don’t treat us as such…
