Discover Together Beta : Announcement & Feedback

General Discussions Plex Features
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Today we’re excited to launch this new functionality as a beta release to Plex Pass subscribers. It’s a set of features designed to help you and your friends discover great new content on and off Plex.

New Features

This isn’t just one feature, but a collection of new and updated experiences designed to make it easy to see what your friends are up to and share your own activity.

  • User Profile: This highlights your own Watch History, Ratings, or Watchlist. You can decide which of these hubs you’d like to share with your friends.
  • Watch History Stats: Your Profile will include stats showing the number of movies, shows, and episodes you’ve watched. If you’ve enabled the Sync Watch State and Ratings feature, these stats will include activity from any Personal Media Servers you have access to as well.
  • Activity Feed: See what your friends have watched, rated, added to their Watchlist, or shared with you.
  • Detail Page Activity: When you view the detail page for a title, you can see which of your friends have already watched, rated, or watchlisted it. Any messages you receive about that title will be visible here as well.
  • Share: Recommend a title to a friend or a group of friends with a message
  • Report Issue: This makes it easy for someone with access to your server to report a problem with a personal media title.

Privacy Settings

  • When you join the beta, your activity is private by default.
  • After you join, you’ll see a series of screens introducing the feature and allowing you to change your privacy settings to ‘Friends Only’ for your watch history, ratings, and watchlist. You can keep any or all of these private if you wish.
  • Your friends’ activity data will start with a setting of ‘private’ unless and until they decide to start sharing their activity with you.

Support Docs

Joining the Beta

You’ll need to have an active Plex Pass or already have access to the Beta to enable this for your account. Discover Together is not available for Managed Accounts. You’ll need a full Plex account to use these features.

When you join the Beta, all of your friends will get access as well, including those without a Plex Pass. Your Plex friends will receive an email notifying them that you enrolled in the Beta and included them.

Enable this for your account here: https://www.plex.tv/discover-together-beta

Supported Clients

Discover Together is currently available on:

  • Android (mobile) (version 9.6.1+)
    Android TV (v 9.12.2 +)
  • iOS (version 8.7.1+)
  • Plex Web (version 4.88+, available in the hosted web app right now)

We’re working to bring these same features to our TV apps.

TV app support has been added

Android TV (9.12.2 and newer)
Apple TV (8.15 and newer)
Smart TVs (v5.53.5 and newer)
Playstation, Xbox (v5.53.5 and newer)
Plex HTPC (v1.32.2 and newer)
Roku (v7.0.30 and newer)

EDIT Oct 16, 2023

Some new and updated features for Discover Together

  • Apple - iOS mobile [version 8.26 (7089)]
  • AppleTV [version 8.26 (7089)]
  • Android mobile [version 10.1.0.4284]
  • Android TV [version 10.1.2.4386]
  • Web Desktop [version 4.116.0]
  • Plex Desktop for Windows/Mac/Linux [version 1.79.0]
  • Web TV [version 5.69.0]
  • Plex HTPC for Windows/Mac/Linux [version 1.48.0]
  • Roku [version 7.9.3]

Privacy Controls

Updated privacy controls

https://support.plex.tv/articles/profile/

My Friends: Allow others to view your friends list
Account Visibility : Decide if you want your account to show up in Search, your Friends’ lists, and Friend Suggestions.

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Revamped - Friends tab - Now called “People”

https://support.plex.tv/articles/friends/

Includes

  • Pending sent and received Friend requests
  • Friend Suggestions
  • Friend Search

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Feature Update Oct 26th

Activity Feed Comments

  • Oct 26 - Android, AndroidTV, iOS, Web
  • Oct 31 - Web TV ( LG, Samsung, Playstation, HTPC, etc)
  • Nov 16 - Apple TV, Roku

Previously when you replied on an activity it made a new activity card with the reply as it is was a new message. Now if there are comments on a card that is added to the card and you can open up a new activity screen with the entire thread of comments.

There is also a new notification setting for comments/replies.

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Reported Issues

Reported issues now have their own feed in the web app. Accessible via the user menu. They will not be in the regular Activity feed anymore.

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Since this is a beta, there are a few known issues we wanted to make you aware of. We’ll keep this post up to date if any new issues are found.

Known Issues

  • All platforms: The message displayed when removing a Watchlist activity from your feed is incorrect. Removing an activity will only remove it from the feed. Your profile will always show the current items on your watchlist.
  • Web: If you have not enabled the Sync Watch State feature, your profile will include a note asking you to enable it. This note cannot be dismissed (but will be removed when the Sync feature is enabled). This will be dismissable in a future update.
  • My Friends’ Activity email and push notifications aren’t being sent yet, but there is a setting to control them. These emails and push notifications will ramp up soon.
  • Email: the notification you receive when someone sends you a message may have an image with an incorrect aspect ratio.
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Okay, I seriously love this and will probably get a lot of use out of it! However, theres is a serious flaw in how this works that I believe need to be addressed…

Sometimes we share our library with people we wouldn’t actually call a “Friend”, such as friends of friends, friends family members and even some of our own (distant) family members…

I would personally love to share my recommendations and watch history with my actual friends, that, would be useful! But, I don’t want to be sharing my watch history with my friends family or their friends etc. We need an option to mark people as “Acquaintance” or something similar to truly make this feature worth it… otherwise its just doomed to be disabled and thats not what I want :man_shrugging:

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Thanks for feedback. Will pass that along

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Is there no way to “Resolve” or “Remove” a reported issue?

I also can’t “Reply” to issues reported to myself. There is no “Reply” button on the activity.

Edit: I removed the reported issue activity using the API.

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why would you report something to yourself? { edit - guess could be just be used as a reminder)

a “resolved” flag is interesting. I think we thought the admin would just reply to the user that it was. but I can see a macro being useful

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I’m getting an ‘Invalid username or email address’ when trying to add one of my managed Users’ usernames. The name is formatted like this ‘A Name’ if that makes any difference.
Or maybe managed users aren’t included in this?

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Like all of Discover features this does not work with managed users at this time. added that info to the first post

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Because I was just testing out the new feature to see how it works and now I have a bunch of stuff I reported to myself that I cannot remove.

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That’s fair. thanks for feedback

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I think there needs to be a filter on the Activity page for different activities. For example, reports can get lost in the feed. Alternatively, maybe a hub on my profile page with all the reports to me.

An icon or message on the server’s details/pre-play page to indicate “there is a reported issue with this media” would also be useful.

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In the Activity feed, does it make logical sense for us to see the mark as watched / unwatched button (and watchlist) on other peoples activity? At first I thought it was giving me the option to mark it as unwatched for them :sweat_smile:

Also, theres a lot of dead space on the feed, have you guys considered maybe a grid view to try and utilise more of the space?

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On the bottom left of the associated activities you can mark as watched or put in your own watchlist.like if your friend watched something and you decide to watch it to or realize that you’ve already seen it

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The whole all your friends get auto enrolled in the beta is an issue…

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This has to be available for Music too! :smiley:

Is this something you plan to? because I tryied it right away! :slight_smile:

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This is great. I’m just starting to play with it but one problem I noticed right away is that sharing Watchlist, Watchlist History, and Ratings is with all friends or none. It would be much better to be able to select which friends each of those categories is shared with.

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+1

Yup. I don’t want to send emails to all of my FRIENDS also. Not all of the FRIENDS are my actual friend.

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Okay yeah I see what you mean for this use case, but (without testing) how does the UX work?

If somebody shares a show and I hit the watched button, does it just mark all of the episodes as watched or do I get a confirmation saying it’s going to mark the whole show watched?

The reason I was confused was specifically from the watched an episode activity, for what reason would somebody need a button to mark it as watched / unwatched for a show somebody is watching 7 seasons deep and you’ve never head of the show? You have no way to watchlist the show from that activity either and the mark as watched button is essentially useless.

You are right in saying it has a useful function, but I feel this function isn’t needed on every activity. Frankly, even if I was interested in something my friend watched, I would check out the show / movie page first before I would even consider putting it in my watchlist. I don’t speak for everybody but I feel like they’re a little redundant (at least to me)

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You get the same confirmation you would if you marked an entire season or show as marked in the library

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There nothing forcing anyone to click it. If you want to look at the detail page for a show/movie before hand you can click on the poster or title in activity to do so. But maybe you have already seen trailers for it elsewhere like on YouTube and just forgot about it, see the activity and decide to click it right then. Like I know I want to see She Hulk when it comes out, my friend had already watchlisted the other day so I just clicked it there since I have no need to go to detail page.

As far as marking watched for episodes it is just there since why not. It doesn’t hurt anything since you don’t have to click it if you don’t want to. Maybe you watched it together at their house on their account and you just need a reminder to mark it watched yourself

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We don’t have the same sort of online DB for music that we do for TV and Movies which is relied on to make this work without knowing what is in anyone’s server libraries. Not saying it won’t work for music one day but it is not in any current plans that I am aware of. We would need to build that DB first I think