With the holidays coming we have purchased a couple of Amazon devices, one of which is an Echo Dot for my eldest son, however, it turns out the Plex skill does not work with kids accounts! This is very disappointing. Is this something that can be fixed or changed?
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We donāt support Plex Home on Alexa today. We currently have no plans to do so. Our current recommendation is to add an Amazon account to your Amazon Home and switch the full Alexa profile to another account that you can then another Plex skill to.
Iām not quite sure I understand precisely what you are saying. Do you mean you do not support using Plex Home accounts with Alexa? If that is the case, that is fine as I can create a Plex account for my children and add that to my server, however, this would not solve the issue of the Plex skill not being available to Freetime enabled accounts on echo devices.
To be a bit more clear, if I switch to my sonās Alexa profile, I cannot access the Plex skill, rightfully so by the way as it is not listed a skill that can be enabled on Freetime devices. However, if I switch to my Alexa account it works just fine, again that makes sense if one considers that the skill is enabled on my account.
It seems the main issue is the Plex skill needs to be listed as a Freetime ready skill?
Perhaps we are having a slight disconnect when it comes to jargon usage? Let me know if this needs more clarification.
I contacted Amazon support & spoke with them for about 30 minutes last night about this issue. They basically said it has to do with the developer-provided rating that is submitted with the Skill that controls whether you may grant a FreeTime-enabled account access to the skill (i.e. whether it is displayed in the list of enabled skills).
For example, the Angry Bard skill is available for me to grant access to my FreeTime accounts, but Plex is not. If you go to these skillsā details page in the Alexa app, note the Rating section. Both skills show āDynamic Contentā & āGuidance Suggestedā. I canāt tell the difference between the 2. The Amazon rep suggested I contact Plex support to request that the rating of the Plex Alexa Skill be reduced in order to enable it on my FreeTime accounts.
Sidenote: I was contacting Amazon originally to complain that I could not grant FreeTime accounts access to music in my Amazon Music Library (with explicit filter) like I can for Pandora/Spotify/Apple Music. And their default player is iHeartRadioā¦ Seems like a huge design flaw for them to encourage people to use 3rd-party music services rather than their own. So I thought I might try working around this issue via the Plex skill, but canāt get around the Plexās rating issue now.
Hey @djwhitey, Iāve come to the same conclusion. It makes no sense to have that rating on an app/skill when we have complete control over the content.
@vanstinator could you take a look into this or send it over to the right department?
Iām going to chime in and say that this is annoying. I have my kidsā content on my Plex server but their Echos canāt play it because of how the skill works.
We can certainly look on our end. Weāre heading to certification āsoonā for another release so we may be able to make this change. Iāll contact our rep and see what we need to do. I canāt promise anything though.
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Thanks for the update. Would love to hear what the feedback was from the AWS rep or if the next release is able to downgrade the maturity rating.
Any word on this? Still waiting to be able to have my kids access their libraries.
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Got the email about the Plex skill for Alexa now supports German. Great.
How about reducing the maturity rating so I can grant access to the skill in FreeTime? In the meantime, Iād suggest adding this limitation to Known Limitations.
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@djwhitey, I agree. I only got into the Amazon ecosystem due to better Plex support, but it seems it is not a bit selling point after all. Might just sell the Amazon devices I have and go Google, forgetting integration Plex at this time. Love ya Plex, but this skill really has functionality issues, and as I type this message it is no longer playing tv shows again via the skill on my Fire Cube.
*Hangs head in defeat*
+1 on the Plex skill rating. The root issue is Amazon needs to give parents whitelisting controls like Windows 10 for all Alexa apps and skills. Iām not interested in delegating my parenting to an AI, corporate censor, or community moderator. But in the meantime, getting the Plex rating down to kid friendly is a good start. Plex lets us pick what media our kids consume. Itās one of the few media streaming platforms that does.
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Anyone from Plex team can you respond to this? I discovered this post from a Google search. Can you change your maturity rating for the Plex Skill to Everyone so I can enable it in FreeTime?
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I agree we have several audio books that we would like to be able to play from plex to our kids echodot.
Not being able to stream music with Plex with a freetime-enabled Alexa device is frustrating for my family too! If Plex could make the Plex skill compatible with freetime it would be a greater user experience and the responsibility to enable the Plex Skill for a child would still belong to the parent. Parents know what content they have after all. Could Plex provide a rationale for not doing this change? Is it as minor as it seems? Could you provide a little bit of visibility on a plan? Thanks!
Is there any update on this? Itās totally ridiculous you canāt fix thisā¦
Has anyone manage to make Plex work with Amazon FreeTime?
Plex is listed under the āAdd Content - Appsā section of parents.amazon.com (which sounds like an improvement from the time of the original posting,) but Alexa still says āI canāt do thatā when we try to open Plex. I even tried turning off the Age Filter and disabling the Explicit Filter, to no avail.
Iāve always been able to allow the Plex App. Still waiting on a fix for the rating on the Plex Skill
For anyone still trying to do this it does not work and has not worked in over a year. Iād imagine it is likely related to the fact that Plex is trying to be a meduahub now with other sources than our tightly controlled libraries.
That being said, you could always use the devices outside of the freetime setup and it works fine. I did the same over a year ago and not had any issues.
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