We have playlist support thanks to this request https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/46288
But 5 years later still nothing even remotely similar to PseudoTV.
So far we currently have basic playlists: The playlist UI is so basic, the only way to create and add to playlists is via web ui and by navigating each episode/show and adding them to a playlist(can’t do them in bulk). This also means smart playlists don’t exist in which you can create playlists by metadata (age rating, origin channel, country of origin, language, etc) which is a real shame. Actually there’s are library filters by genre, content rating and network and these library filters can be added to playlists, but these don’t appear to be smart playlists that auto update as content changes, nor can be manipulated after the fact.
Once your basic playlists are created there’s no Pseudo-tv interface to view them ‘realtime’ such as an EPG (Electronic Program Guide) 
So effectively the only option available, is to launch these basic playlists, watch all your manually added content in order. Or by going to the … menu and selecting Shuffle. I’m not sure how this is meant to work, but sometimes this only shuffles the order of the episodes a show and not mixing the shows together. Sometimes it mixes the shows together.
Now in terms of EPG the closest thing we have is the Up Next button, which shows the next 7 queued shows in the playlist.
There’s also a tiny little button on the top right of the Up Next Playlist that shows other playlists. So if you click that you can effectively switch between playlists as if they were channels.
problem is, these are unshuffled, so you’d need to manually go into your playlists screen shuffle each playlist a few times, then start watching one playlist, and use Up Next to look ahead in your EPG, you can’t look behind, but there is a back button, you just can’t visualise the list. Then you ‘switch channels’ by using the change playlist button, but there’s no preview of the up next for those playlists until you’ve already switched.
So the main problems current preventing us from having a PseudoTV experience on Plex are:
- Playlist creation is very basic, no smart playlists, nothing can be made with metadata or attributes.
- The closest thing we have to an EPG is an Up Next menu, and a playlist/“channel” switch button. No way to compare the Up Next of the different playlists, nor is there a way to them look realtime, nor is there a way to preview the history of the playlist by seeing what has already ‘aired’. Also the switch playlist button doesn’t exist on the Roku App, so you need to back all the way out to the playlists nd select a different playlist.
- Playlists support is mostly Web UI based, and those of us with Plex Home Theater or Android/Roku apps are kinda limited Construction of playlists is web only, you can’t even add shows to existing playlists from the Roku app. Plus on HT, there’s a Playlist menu item, but clicking that doesn’t do anything for me. Trying to shuffle all the Playlists is impossible. Now to me this is actually a very minor issue, because if smart playlists existed you could construct all the playlists in advance and not really need to edit them in any way from the playback device.
So in my mind there’s only these 3 areas that are lacking for us to get a decent PseudoTV experience. I put them in order of construction, but it also works well as an order of priority. An EPG would be great, but having smart playlists would bring us much closer to a decent pseudotv experience as we’d be able to better simulate channels.
