The Problem: My wife and I watch 80% of our media together. For stuff we watch together, we use my account so that it ends up watched for me, but not for her. Her account’s watch list ends up being inaccurate because it is too hard to continue to manually adjust the watched states for all the media she watches with me together. As a result, one of our watch lists will always be only 50% useful. Creating a “joint account” does not solve the problem and adds additional work and complexity to managing watch lists. It is furthermore not viable for casual users and I do believe this kind of feature is important to casual users and would be adopted by casual users if done well from UI/UX perspective which is, in my opinion, easily accomplished here.
The Solution: I think that multi-user sessions should be supported to reflect actual viewing realities. I believe the paradigm should be that instead of logging into User A or User B, you can log into User A AND/OR User B AND/OR User C, etc. This would create either a “viewing party” or log in a single user as before.
4 pieces of logic need to change:
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When filtering for watched or unwatched status when browsing a library, filter it such that it shows/hides based on ALL users’ watch lists. I.e., if all people have Watched, then treat as Watched in that session.
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When accounting for viewing progress of media, update ALL user’s viewing progress of media.
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When accounting for watched status of media, update ALL users watched status of media.
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When marking something as watched/unwatched manually, update ALL users watched status of media.
Reasoning: Making these changes does not fundamentally alter the UI/UX that Plex already has in place. Furthermore, it would be something either normal users would use because it’s an elegant implementation, or it would not get in their way because no UI elements would change. Personally, based on conversations I’ve had with my wife and friends when they are over, they all made same observation about this shortcoming and thought that it made sense that you should be able to communicate to Plex who is watching the media.
The only UI/UX I see changing is that if you went to the account area where you’d normally log in or switch users, there would be either an option to ‘add user to session’ or when you hit an account chooser pop-up, you simply click on all of the accounts you want, have a checkmark appear next to each name, and then confirm by hitting ‘Done’. Then have some UI element that shows the multiple people logged in somewhere on the screen. I think this flow is very easy to pick up intuitively, similar to how consoles use the concept of a ‘party’ to play games together across the Internet.
This is my #1 feature request–I kind of assumed it was always coming to Plex eventually but after doing some searching I figured it couldn’t hurt to throw this up here anyway. Thanks for reading. I did search this forum to see if anyone posted something similar. If I missed it, I apologize.
