Feature Request: Deep-link to bought on-demand movies from services like VUDU or Apple TV

[TOMillr]

@McWanke Thanks for taking the time to provide some insides from a devs perspective.

@McWanke

There may be other ways to make this happen, but those are two ideas off the top of my head. And none of the ideas would work unless we had the specific link to the purchased title vs the VOD title, which we don’t currently have.

Are you familiar with the implementation of “Stream Links” by Channels DVR and Infuse I’ve linked to above? Wouldn’t that be an easier way to implement what we’re looking for?

@McWanke

If you did want to try something here, you could select our “buy” link on Where to Watch and see if that takes you to that page on that specific app where assuming you are logged in that app might have your purchase info for that title and get you to where you want to be

Like @csa4140 mentioned, the buy-link in the Where to Watch-section takes you to the previously purchased title (the particular Plex client has to support deeplinking, of course).

We “just” need a way to have those purchase titles show up in the Plex library in the first place. That’s why I feel like the Stream Link implementation would be a good solution.

Adding support for .strmlnk files would allow users to add purchased titles to the Plex library. The .strmlnk files contain the specific url to the purchased title you were referring to as not being available to Plex.

This could work like this:

_The user provides the .strmlnk file, which contains the name, year and direct link url for a particular movie or tv series.
_Plex detects .strmlnk file and adds it to the library like a regular local media file.
_For Plex clients which support deep linking, a “Play on XYZ”-button is displayed instead of the regular play button. Clicking the button opens the 3rd party app and jumps to the content entry provided in the .strmlnk file(in all cases I was able to try, this direct link is identical to the “buy” link available through Plex btw).

Plex clients without support for deep linking could instead just display a prominent “Available on XYZ” label in place of the play button. That way the user would know where to look for a particular title.

[TOMillr]

@McWanke

However, most apps treat a “purchased” versus a “VOD” (video-on-demand) title differently even through they are the same actual movie. Therefore, the deeplink to a purchased title will be a different link than we are currently providing. You could actually see this in action if you could find a title that was offered on one service for rental and another for purchase (rental is a different ID as well)

I’m not sure that this is actually a problem. Take the movie “Back to the Future” for example. On JustWatch, the link to the rented-version is the same as the buy-version for all stream services they list.

This also applies to cases, where a title is also available as part of a subscription. Back to the Future in Germany is available as part of a Prime Video subscription, but can also be bought or rented through Amazon. All three links on JustWatch point to the same entry.