I would like to suggest an improvement to the Plex Home screen recommendations.
For users with large libraries containing thousands of movies, the Home screen often shows the same posters and the same titles for long periods of time. As a result, many excellent movies remain practically invisible because they rarely, if ever, appear on the Home screen.
Most users naturally choose something from what they immediately see. If the recommendations remain mostly unchanged, they tend to watch the same subset of the library while thousands of other titles are overlooked.
It would be very helpful to have an option such as:
Rotate recommendations every day (or every few hours).
Randomize the movies displayed within recommendation rows.
Ensure that over time every movie has a chance to appear on the Home screen.
Optionally allow server administrators to configure how often the recommendations refresh.
This could significantly improve content discovery, especially for servers with large collections shared with family and friends. Instead of always promoting the same movies, Plex would encourage users to discover more of the library they already have access to.
This could be an optional setting, so users who prefer the current behavior could keep it unchanged.
I believe this would make the Home screen feel much more dynamic while increasing engagement with existing libraries.
It shows up to 50 items from my movie library which haven’t been watched in the last 9 months (the limit of 50 and the time frame were arbitrary choices on my part). I then published this collection to my Home Screen.
The result is a dynamically-updated on my home screen which updates fairly frequently (for example, on the web app, every page refresh).
The above is just an example; you could further tailor it to suit your needs by filtering on other criteria, such as genre, actors, resolution, etc…).
I know, thank you, but the problem is not me, but my friends who joined my server. They are bored, or they don’t know the search engine, they are comfortable, they like what they see better, and if they see the same covers, they complain that there is nothing new, even though there is. I don’t know if what you are saying can be solved by putting it on the start screen of my friends, and everyone has a different style, some people don’t like action movies, so Plex should dynamically recommend them from my server based on their habits.
I don’t think I explained what I was suggesting very well. The idea is that you create the filter and save it as a collection (which makes it a smart collection).
You can then publish that smart collection to your friends’ home screens using the collection’s “more” menu:
To your friends, this will look like any other hub; but this one you curate. You can call it whatever you like (I call mine “Random Unwatched Movies”) and that’s how it will be listed on your friends’ home screens,
You can re-order how the hubs appear on their home screens, making this new row appear above Plex’s defaults (you can even choose not to display Plex’s, if you like). This is all documented in the links I provided above (click the orange text in my original post).
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting they use the search/filter functionality themselves.
[Edit]
Also, I don’t mean to dismiss your feature suggestion. The above is just something you could do in the meantime to make the experience a little more dynamic.
