Pro Week ‘25: Fireside in the Forum AMA

General Discussions
44

Question:

why is it that after all this time, plex inc is still not all that great at bringing people from the community into the fold to have us help you evangelize and help roll things out? There are several people who are high-signal QA capable folk, who try to help y’all improve the quality of new experiences etc– but you won’t roll out anything alpha to us, instead using some random youtuber who’s making a plex-pro-week video about it?

Answer:
We have several programs for users to get early access to our products but they do vary depending on the app and scope of the testing. These opportunities are designed to get our community’s feedback before a new feature is rolled out to all users.

  • Plex Media Server Betas: Plex Pass subscribers can access beta versions of the Plex Media Server, which allows them to test new features and provide feedback on the core of the Plex experience.
  • Mobile App Betas: For both iOS and Android, we offer beta programs. On iOS, you can join our TestFlight programs, and on Android, you can sign up for the beta channel through the Google Play Store. Note: Sometimes the TestFlight beta can be full and we realize this is frustrating. We are constantly working to free up slots but this is a limitation on Apple’s App Store.
  • TV Apps: Roku offers an early channel (Plex Preview) and tvOS has had a program on TestFlight called Plex Experience Preview for about a year. In both cases these are updated on a regular basis. These are essentially beta or even alpha-level builds that give you a sneak peek at new features and allow you to help us test them.

We’ve also offered more targeted efforts for projects like Plex Media Server FFMPEG6 upgrades on our forums and various tvOS playback investigations. So all of this being said, Plex will continue to try and find fun ways to get more of our users testing the software early on a regular basis. In parallel to these efforts, we are also discussing internally how we might be able to relaunch a user testing program (Ninjas), but want to do it in a way that is impactful for both Plex and the users testing new software.