The new streaming media sources from Plex are great, however here in Australia the choice is pretty poor and limited when it comes to content. I can appreciate that it is all about rights etc, but there’s not a lot of quality viewing in the movies and TV Shows that have popped up this morning.
Thank you for you efforts and work on this feature though.
As hard as I try, I simply cannot think of any genuine reason why content would be limited to region.
This service is supplied by Plex, and the content is supplied by the streaming partners, so in theory, “rights” should have no reasonable baring on this.
There is a post on the forum that mentions how the adds are too loud, and a user suggests watching Terminator 1 as an example, but being in the UK, Terminator 1 is not listed…
But whats the point? As I mentioned previously, I simply cannot think of any valid reason why the streaming partner would want to limit who can see that film!
because corporate media owners think they can and/or do make more money by region locking.
Plex licenses the content, they are not “supplying” it – that is done by the content owners; and that licensing has certain restrictions, including limiting by region.
This is the reality of content licensing and “theory” has nothing to do with it unfortunately.
Streaming rights for most content is very tightly controlled by a small number of corporations in Australia (Village for example). I wouldn’t expect much top tier titles to make it through to our region.
Plex can’t do anything about if content owners wanted to lock movies/tv shows to some region. You’re complaining to the wrong people.
If you’re really want to see free content from US or UK or Australia, go use VPN. It will solve your problem.
Ok, in the real world maybe, but isn’t this service free? Therefore I don’t see how this applies in this case.
I’m not necessarily complaining, I just don’t see the point!
As an example, who possibly benefits from me not being able to see Terminator 1? Plex? Nope! The streaming partner? Nope! And certainly not the advertisers as they are not reaching me in this example…
So if there is no financial gain to be made by ANY of the parties involved, then I ask again… What’s the point?
“Free” (to view with ads) has nothing to do with it.
Plex had to sign a contact. That contract states where movies can be made available and where they can not. This is standard practice regardless if Plex charges end users for it or not.
Control. If you can’t get it for free where you are then you might be willing to pay for it.
Control for controls sake I’d say!
Sounds to me like dangling the proverbial carrot!
Anyways, here’s another question… Why the **** am I posting on this forum at 3.30am??? .lol
Look at it this way, if a movie studio sells the exclusive rights to it’s films to Streaming Provider A in a country, it can’t then go and sell the rights to Plex to provide for free on it’s service.
Streaming rights to moves aren’t globally assigned across the world, there are many variations. It’s different for each country.
To use your Terminator example, that’s currently available on Netflix UK and they (Netflix) licensed the rights to broadcast it in the UK for a set period of time (usually 1yr) and will have paid the studio a fair amount for those rights. Netflix presumably have a contract which prevents the studio from making Terminator available for free-to-air broadcast.
Sky/NowTV have contracts for the vast majority of first-run movies from major studios and they almost always insist on exclusivity because otherwise why would anyone pay £10-20 a month for Sky movies on any platform in HD or otherwise if they could watch that content somewhere else for free?
All Plex can do is show you what their content providers have made available in your region. Outside of the US, that will be severely limited because most movie streaming rights are currently licensed or contracted to Sky and/or its local variants, Canal+, Amazon, Netflix, etc.
you’re still lucky.
In Italy plex is offering literally nothing interesting. Only old and not famous movies.
Here we have too many on demand services (netflix, amazon, sky & now tv, infinity, raiplay, mediasetplay, chili, apple and soon disney+) so it’s almost impossibile to find a movie that no service owns rights.
Well, Im in the UK and Terminator 1 isnt in my stream… Do wonder how it works out where you are and what to deliver… So far there is nothing I would watch in it as its all B movies except for Zulu 
We’re not that lucky. UK Plex has three (3) TV shows in total and most of the films are recent ones with no-one you’ve heard of and a score of less than 10 on Rotten Tomatoes or they’re made before 1975.
The annoying thing is that movie discovery is so poor at present. The pre-filled categories are awful (surfing and skiing?!!) and clicking on an actor’s name doesn’t even show you all the films they’re in. There are two Roger Moore movies from the 1970s, but clicking his name shows only ‘Shout at the Devil’. Clicking on ‘Shout at the Devil’ offers ‘Escape to Athena’ under ‘similar movies’. You also currently can’t search by actor, but I assume that will improve over time.
Yes, I am in Canada and the selection currently leaves a lot to be desired…
That, and AAC audio
Kev
Same here in Austria.
Only a couple of what you would call … B- or C-movies.
Thanks @hugothehippo - To be fair, that does kinda make sense.
Which all means… I can’t rage against the man any more about this one!
perhaps instead of crappy content for NON-US, they should have just rolled out ONLY-US.
Look guys, you don’t have to be a genius to understand that plex doesn’t control what the studios/content providers allows or does not allow in various regions.
Be glad you get something and hope that this service does well enough to expand.
Otherwise, it will simply go bye bye just like many other failed plex projects.
take it as a competition: find the needle in the haystack.
there’s some nice ones in that heap.
admittedly… they can be hard to find 
If you want to understand the corporate mindset, you will have to have a lobotomy first.
