Unfortunately PLEX introduced the News feature without really thinking about parents and their kids. My kids have their own PLEX account in my PLEX Home (mainly because in former times it was not possible to have an avatar for managed Accounts). Now PLEX added News and even though my kids are only allowed to watch content rated de/0 or G and have no access to channels they have access TO ALL F*ING NEWS.
You can not be serious with that. My kids could watch vivid news of the Las Vegas shooting or whatever horrible things are happening over the world.
You have to give us a way to disable this feature immediately or at least honor the age restrictions parents impose on the accounts.
Plex News…absolutely awful…Viewed it…all USA news and Im in the UK - WTF-ck. Tried again today, all about My Little Pony…absolutly sick Plex…hey PLEX…you have a brilliant product, totally spoiled with this Plex News update crap…get it off my Plex ASAP. Thank you.
I’m sure it is a hard pill to swallow, because they spent money acquiring a company to do this, but seriously, is anyone going to use it? I was messing around with it the other night. Its just full of junk. I don’t think it is built for the way people consume news anyway. I feel that people want a stream of news they can just watch, of they want to scroll through headlines, click what is interesting and bounce around. That isn’t as easy with video.
I don’t think this is going to be the revenue stream they hoped for. Honestly, I love Plex so much and bought a lifetime sub years and years back. I’ve gotten more than my money out of it. If they need the cash flow I would rather them come clean and go back on the lifetime sub and ask me for more money. I just want it to play the media I feed it well and on every major device.
I flicked through it. The channels are terrible. Apparently they have “over 190 global publisher partners (and growing!)” and 17 (terrible) channels. I smell a ton of BS on that ‘190’. Even so, it’s 190 of the bottom dwellers - the ‘news’ is from the age of Facebook news - <5 minute clips with very little info, they autoplay for some reason, and the “world news” section had 5 or 6 stories from the USA (so much for ‘global partners’) and none from where I live despite the program asking for a country. This is a clusterf(&*$.
I don’t mind the news tab, it has potential and actually is kinda handy. My only disappointment with it was every video I tried was very mediocre quality burn I’m guessing that has to do with the providers.
Not sure about the ratings thing, I mean news is generally rated for everyone to watch since it’s real world and not made up like a movie or video games. Often times news is playing in restaurants, stores, shops etc. it is what it is and far as that goes.
@sica said:
Yeah, but usually I don’t let my 4-year old watch the news… because there is stuff in the world going on that is to much for their mind to comprehend.
As much as I detest this ad filled USA only news crap that’s only there to earn €€ after the watchup takeover … I at least understand that it’s quite possible to have your kids go without news altogether.
You have to give them a “managed account” use account. These don’t show the news option. I’m off a mind to make myself a managed user as well because of this.
@stefanvanruiten yep, that would mean delete their watched history and start all over. This should not be necessary. I should be able to control which user is able to watch which content on MY server. I should not be forced to have to delete accounts and start over.
@kinoCharlino said: @sica, hiding the News feature is currently being worked on. For the time being, you can setup your kids as Managed Users and they will not see News.
It is very nice to know it is being worked on but this is something Plex needs to realize BEFORE releasing a feature. Do not release it half done without proper kid support. To people without kids it is no big deal but to people with children it can be a very big deal. You can also say use a managed account (Which the only reason I could think someone would not have done was because they did not want to start the watch history again for a child) so either provide a way to copy the watch history over or do not release a feature so quick without thought.
@hackztor@gmail.com said:
It is very nice to know it is being worked on but this is something Plex needs to realize BEFORE releasing a feature. Do not release it half done without proper kid support. To people without kids it is no big deal but to people with children it can be a very big deal. You can also say use a managed account (Which the only reason I could think someone would not have done was because they did not want to start the watch history again for a child) so either provide a way to copy the watch history over or do not release a feature so quick without thought.
“Kid support” is inherent in Managed Users. That’s one of the key uses of that feature and a very common use case, as you can apply parental control on a per-managed user basis. My understanding of your scenario is that you are allowing your kids to use your admin account, which is not locked down by parental controls and gives them full access to administer your PMS. As a parent, I would suggest setting up each child as a Managed User so you can independently control their access. As for being able to copy watch history, that is an interesting idea and I will pass the feature suggestion along, though I wonder how you would discern between what you have watched and what your kids have watched (since its on the same user account), unless you’ve created separate libraries for them to distinguish content and activity.
@kinoCharlino no, that is not the case. As a Plex Employee you probably know, that it is possible to add other Plex Accounts to your Plex Home. My kids can not administer my PMS and with adding them to my Plex Home I can have the same control over what they watch as if they were a managed account. I had to choose this solution because at the time the managed user feature was added it was not possible to give a managed account an avatar.
But rest assured, besides the Plex News feature, my kids have no more rights than a managed account.
For the time being I blocked news.provider.plex.tv on my firewall which seems to work so far.
@kinoCharlino I actually have my kids as separate accounts and they are friended and not part of my plex home this way it is impossible for them to switch accounts to other people in plex home that might have additional library access or no age restrictions.
Not all the accounts on my home have pins because I don’t want to force my family to use a pin to safe guard against my kids. This works perfect except they now have the news channel so I do not let them use the app on their tablets anymore until it is fixed. If you somehow prohibited a managed user from switching accounts that would be a great feature, maybe a pin to sign off instead of a pin to sign into other accounts. So the managed user option is good but more control over them would be better. glad to hear we will have more control over the news channel.
I won’t hate on plex for trying something new, they can’t appease everyone but give us the options. They need to work towards some different business models because the whole we let you stream your questionable media does not scale well. As soon as the media industry catches up and provides a cheap easy way to legally get content that will dominate, look at spotify as an example.
There is something to be said about going with a more mature product than emby, plex works everywhere and on everything. They got this way because of their size and corporate backing, emby will never get that 3rd party support for a long time or ever since they are the small home brew, open source like alternative. It may work really good like many of these types of things but will never get as big.
Thanks everyone for your feedback, including how you use Plex with your children. There are different way to do it and its helpful to get a sense of your perspectives and approaches. Plex News is a large enough release that we are working on a “fast follow” to cover some functionality and issues that didn’t make it in before code lock. I’m glad we’re seeing the enable/disable capability coming in the fast follow release.
@sica said:
Unfortunately PLEX introduced the News feature without really thinking about parents and their kids. My kids have their own PLEX account in my PLEX Home (mainly because in former times it was not possible to have an avatar for managed Accounts). Now PLEX added News and even though my kids are only allowed to watch content rated de/0 or G and have no access to channels they have access TO ALL F*ING NEWS.
You can not be serious with that. My kids could watch vivid news of the Las Vegas shooting or whatever horrible things are happening over the world.
You have to give us a way to disable this feature immediately or at least honor the age restrictions parents impose on the accounts.
Sica, this eaxct situation is what I am in. My 5 and 9 year got freaked out over watching news about church shootings. Then I realized I couldn’t turn it off… I had to remove Plex from their fireTV and switch to emby because I couldn’t disable the news…
Thank you Plex for this. I have been long time supporter of Plex and something as stupid of not giving me the option to disable news feed… Very well thought out !!
@sica said: @kinoCharlino no, that is not the case. As a Plex Employee you probably know, that it is possible to add other Plex Accounts to your Plex Home. My kids can not administer my PMS and with adding them to my Plex Home I can have the same control over what they watch as if they were a managed account. I had to choose this solution because at the time the managed user feature was added it was not possible to give a managed account an avatar.
But rest assured, besides the Plex News feature, my kids have no more rights than a managed account.
For the time being I blocked news.provider.plex.tv on my firewall which seems to work so far.
I also did the same… Created an account on an email address for the kids I controls because parental controls where not a thing… I have 2 libraries called kids tv shows and kids movies. Then their user account can only access that.
@sica said:
For the time being I blocked news.provider.plex.tv on my firewall which seems to work so far.
Haven’t gotten to my router yet, but does this completely block the NEWS server part or does it just block access to content? I need a solution sooner rather than later, and given the stance of Plex to only respond just after customers have burnt down their house, this might take while…
@GoingGaGa at least for the Fire TV Clients I am using the news part is completely gone.
However blocking does not work anymore, because app.plex.tv shares the same IP addresses. But overriding the name resolution in a Firewall like pfSense works fine. news.provider.plex.tv now resolves to 127.0.0.1 and the news part is gone from the clients at least in my home.
It is kind of depressing that even after a month this is still not fixed on plex’ side.
