Plex to launch paid movies, shows in early February
Independent video streaming platform Plex is gearing up for its next big launch: Plex will add paid movies and TV shows to its service in early February, executives told me during a meeting at the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.
Much like other online video stores (or TVOD services, as industry insiders like to call them), Plex will offer movies and TV shows for rent and purchase. Plex executives told me they had most studios lined up for launch, with plans to complete the catalog soon after.
But a movie and TV show store isn’t the only thing Plex is looking to launch in the coming months: The service is also gearing up for some big changes under the hood, additional social features, and a significant redesign. Keep reading for all the details on what’s in store for Plex in 2024, as well as some new Plex usage metrics:
The more I see Plex expand into a streaming service, the more I wish they’d spin off the Plex Media Server into it’s own separate service/company. I’d wager that more people that have a server want little to do with making it to be “exactly” like streaming services like Netflix, with the social aspects and ad-based videos (and now the ability to purchase media).
While I like some of the new features (discover, watchlist, being able to see info about movies not on my server), I kind of want Plex to provide a OPT-IN-ONLY client that we could have family members install in place of the “Next Netflix” app that they are turning each client into. I totally understand that to make the new features work well for new non-server-member users of Plex, it does suck for those of us that MUST use the same app for our personal servers.
It might also help for the weekly post here where someone purchases the Plex Pass thinking that it would let them stream movies from ALL the streaming services, just because the promotions for Plex are full of non-plain corporate speak about seeing “your favorite streaming services within Plex!”, that means literally just “seeing” a listing for it, not watching the full movie “free”).
The service is also gearing up for some big changes under the hood, additional social features, and a significant redesign.
Unfortunately, I assume they will handle this the same way they handled the privacy options from the last thing. Maybe there will be a couple options shown when a person logs in, but to actually “opt out”, you’d have to dig through various menus.
I’ve been absent from this forum for about a month now, owing primarily to my disillusionment with Plex over the “opt-out” controversy. It seems they still haven’t acknowledged the issue or taken responsibility for it, which is very disappointing.
Anyway, I’ve been spending my time getting re-familiarized with Emby (I’ve had lifetime passes for Plex and Emby for several years – just spent most of my time with Plex), and I have been impressed with the progress they have made. Emby is pretty much a match for Plex in most of the areas that I care about. Emby supports the Composer tag (in their current beta) in music libraries, as well as multiple artists! Several of the features that I have been asking Plex for over several years are present in Emby. On top of that, every post I make in their forum, be it feature request or asking for help, has been answered by someone from Emby, and a few bugs have been fixed within a few days(!)
Plex still has a couple of advantages (filters, and filter-based smart playlists, to name one), but I think I’m finally to the point where Emby is better for my purposes than Plex. So maybe the “opt-out” issue was just the push I needed to find out that there’s a better solution.
(Roettgers says that Plex updated some of the feature’s onboarding processes, and Plex senior product and design director Jason Williams told him that the backlash “kind of vanished pretty quickly afterwards.”)
We are the crazies on the forum and believe me when I say, the management at plex sees us like that.
Like everything with plex, keep a very close eye on what they do and when they inevitably do something you just cannot live with then move on and don’t look back. But have yourself prepared now so you can move relatively smoothly.
For myself, as long as I can continue to turn everything off that is not related to my personal media management and playback then I’ll continue to play “whac-a-mole” with plex.
Oh and “add more social features like public profiles this year”. OMG! The need for every company to want to go social is ridiculous. I hope the next generation look back at this time with laughter when we finally realize the need to share everything is not what is important.
Locally we have multiple major players in the content aggregation business with commercial links to the major streamers and movie/TV company’s.
It has already been done.
Two in particular are the largest content providers in the country and also major communication players. Plex will never get a foot in here.
Plex has yet to do anything well in the content aggregation market, every time it has been a fiasco of some sort. The inability to get the basics right with core components, discussed on this forum extensively, suggests they have their eye firmly on other things.
There are a few Plex staff left that actually help on the forums but they are thinning out.
“once the angriest users had switched to Emby/Jellyfin and the ones who were simply dissatisfied rather than angry realised we as always neither care about or listen to our users concerns they piped down”
The other thing I’ve noticed over the past few months is that the forum overall is quieter. Yes there has been vocal threads however as someone who’s been active on here for many years there feels like there has been far less threads and also folks helping other community members has significantly dropped.
It does feel like a shift is happening with the community. Plex Inc needs to be careful as one move too far and it’ll be a exodus in large numbers.
if it’s another “feature” that is force enabled on to us with no option to completely 100% disable then i’ll be off somewhere else.
if it’s a 100% opt-in feature that you’ll never see unless you specifically say you want it, then i’ll stay until something else is forced on us.
if jellyfin was to suddenly, overnight, have a fully featured tvOS app then i’d be away tomorrow regardless.
Jason Williams is nothing more than a liar, but for people that matter (investors that plex,inc’s CEO is courting), they don’t read the forums. I can only hope my assistance with certain EU postal codes negates the investment round from Intercap.
Plex still does a lot of things well and so far most of the things they’ve done poorly are more fumbles with implementation than conflicts with the features themselves (for the most part). Like Dokuro, as long as I can still turn off the stuff I don’t want enabled for features outside of my local media server then the benefits and investment I find with Plex still outweigh the fumbles for the most part. So I mostly just adjusted my perspective about what “Plex” really is anymore.
I have given up seeing Plex as a product with a community focus - or even customer focus - as it’s now in the hands of “investors”. All future development in Plex will have to be “value added” for increasing profits each year for those investors.
My hope is that the “enshittification” doesn’t go too far and that competition from Emby and Jellyfin may help push Plex to do better since that would impact Plex’s “value” to those investors.
Edit:
I’ve noticed this as well - the engagement is gone. The last UX change had community members joining eary adoption and testing with feedback channels and responses; I haven’t seen any of that in a long time. A lot of devs that used to engage regularly stay away from the forums now (and I don’t blame them - lots of reasons).
Tech Support still happens for the most part, and a few ninjas and devs still engage in good faith but overall the feeling that the Plex forums are a collaborative space between the user and the product owners is pretty much gone.
I’m not sure how Plex plans to provide customer support to people paying for actual content on a regular basis (renting and purchasing) without a more dedicated support structure.
Edit2:
There’s some issues with playback of DV\HDR and Atmos support that have been around for quite a bit - at least that’s one of the major issues I’m aware of myself. Last notes from a Plex employee was that they were aware the TVOS app was lagging behind and they pointed to recent job postings for new apple dev at Plex as possible path forward on it.
Mr. Williams has unfortunately mistaken my silence for acceptance. I can assure you, this is not the case
This has apparently gone unnoticed by the senior product and design director and I’m in no way surprised
People have been saying for a long time that Plex management doesn’t have a pulse on the community and statements like this are only further confirmation of that
All I keep hearing in these puff piece online quotes from management is how successful they are and how much money they’re making. That’s wonderful except that it hasn’t translated into bug fixes or adding a single employee here in the forum to help people. In fact, it appears as though some of them have had their hours cut
I don’t think people are interested in subsidizing the Plex labor force when they’ve been blatantly disrespectful to the same people that were here to help
I would have said the same thing a year ago, but not anymore.
Their track record has beaten the optimism right out of me
