I know a similar though broader idea came up a decade ago but the implementation often seems like an all or nothing approach thats far too complicated.
I think it would be great to be able to set up a stream from across your libraries that your home Plex users can “tune-in” to as if it were a live channel. It could be as simple as a playlist that loops or with minimal scheduling or an option for a nice plex-media screensaver or even trailers between programmed content. That’s it.
This would allow for all kinds of fun holiday programming from across series and could also provide a sense of the missed ‘watch together’ option … let alone the psychological benefit of having a sense of “seeing whats on” or pride in curating a collection that so many Plex admins have.
How do you place your suggestion in context of the one you linked. It sounds quite similar to me… maybe you can emphasize a bit what differences you see.
The idea of a home Plex library streaming channel was a lot less technically feasible back in 2015 and was pitched as “full featured” with many channels and a TV like a programming guide … which would be very cumbersome to build and a bigger overhead for anyone to use.
My suggestion is that the simplest version of the idea does enough. That playlists could be made from across media libraries and stream on loop in a simple ‘Continue Watching’ or ‘Tune In’ option. No need for complicated programming schedules or UI dev across platforms. Key is to keep it simple to reduce friction: this isn’t a way to browse a thousand channels it’s a way to quickly turn on some media without decision fatigue.
Ok so hear me out. So what if we could create a playlist of titles, and this playlist is constantly “airing live” so that you could drop in at any time, similar to how you would on live broadcast? And options could be set if a channel could be played in shuffle, or in chronological order. This way, you have the surprise and delight of new episodes/films, while having a more dynamic way to drop into titles in your media library (with option to rewind/skip, of course).
Imagine a 24/7 feed of “90s Saturday Morning Cartoons”, “80s Action Flicks” “Breaking Bad Marathon”. Would be great if we could also choose the order, name, logo, other preferences for each user-created channel. To be able to “cable surf” in our own media library seems like a dream.
If this were an option, hell I wouldn’t even mind Plex mixing our user-created “Channels” with the real live channels Plex offers, though I rarely use those anyway.
I realize this is similar to shuffling a playlist, though I’m imagining the “live” component would create a more tactile way to engage. Would populate in Plex’s existing live guide view-
It would be great if that could be implemented directly in Plex.
For now you should give https://ersatztv.org/ a try! It’s quite what you want I guess.
