I’m absolutely loving the addition of the “Watchlist” feature in this latest update. Especially with how it integrates with the Discovery feature.
In future updates however, I would love to see this expanded upon - with the option to create “Custom Watchlists”.
I can imagine this functioning somewhat similarly to how Playlists currently operate - allowing the user to create custom titled lists which they can then populate with content.
Only this would of course allow the user to create lists that contain a mixture of TV & Movies from a variety of different sources (thanks to the new Discover feature).
This would allow a lot of user freedom.
I.e. You could choose to create separate watchlist’s for films, tv shows, anime, and cartoons.
Or maybe you might like to create a number of watchlists separated by genre, or director, or film studio, or decade, or even by mood (I.e. “Feel Good Films”, “Sad Films, etc…).
The range and freedom of organisational possibilities would be endless!
I’m not currently sure I fully understand what you’re suggesting.
Is this about creating smart playlists/collections based on what’s on your watchlist or an option to have different watchlists and manually assign items to those? Or something else entirely?
Did a search to keep from recreating this thread, but I wanted to expanded on the usefulness of multiple watchlists.
I think this request needs more attention for all the beneficial ways it could be used.
For instance, I like to create lists of movies to show friends/family. I’ve likely already seen these things, so keeping them on my own list would bog it down greatly and I watch less of what I actually want to see.
To expand on that: I have a sheet of paper tacked to the wall that has the movies/shows my roommate and I want to show each other. It’s intensely frustrating because unless every single detail is noted there, we have to dig to even figure out what the other person is talking about. Forget flipping through them together.
This would also be beneficial for prioritizing things or pausing things for later. For instance, I may be curious about Mystic Pop-Up Bar, but it’s back burnered to some less mellow shows so I’d rather it be in its own list. I don’t want to lose it, but I don’t want to scroll through a million things to find things higher on my list to watch.
As I’m sure many here already recognize, it would be wise to think about the use cases implied here, to see whether ‘multiple lists’ is actually the best solution.
From the comments above, I see:
“Separate watchlists for movies, shows, anime and cartoons.”: To my ears, this sounds like it would be better implemented as the ability to filter one watchlist based on whether items are movies or shows (which the watchlist already provides). Cartoons or anime could be included by allowing users to manually curate tags on watchlist items, then filter for these using similar filters as already exist for movies or shows.
“Create a number of watchlists separated by genre, or director, or film studio, or decade, or even by mood (I.e. “Feel Good Films”, “Sad Films, etc…)”: Again, this might be possible by filtering a single watchlist, based on attributes of the movie (genre) or user-provided tags for watchlist items.
Movies to show friends/family: This is important for me, too. In particular, I want to be able to quickly switch between (a) my full watchlist, and (b) a small subset of the watchlist I want to watch with my kiddo. Multiple lists would achieve this, or so would filtering by a custom tag I apply to watchlist items. For me, this is more important than (1) and (2).
“Prioritizing things or pausing things for later.”: Again, this could be multiple lists, or it could be tags. (Additionally, this might also be served by allowing users to order the items in their watchlist, and having “user-defined order” be one of the sorting options. But that sounds like a lot of extra work)
Don’t let people persuade you to allow users to combine tags. (show movies with tag A but without tag B). It’s not worth the effort.
I completely agree, and been wishing for something like this that we could build categories inside watchlist the same way we do for playlists. The great thing about watchlists is that they show all the streaming locations the media is available from and it is global to all the media available however playlists are localized per media server.
This is not only a great idea ,but one of the most valuable Plex features. Since Plex allows you to add titles to watch lists that aren’t on Plex, and it can search for them across streaming services, this would make Plex the only app that could be the hub for shows on any service. That feature alone could be an app. Adding to Plex would be a game changer for everyone.
With a single watch list it is much less useful because you can’t manage your titles.
Use Case:
I have a giant TV and every time the family visits me, they get into long conversations about “what should we watch” and “which services have which movies”…
I want to make them watchlists for multiple scenarios –
“Movies Kids That Parents Will Like, Too” (my sister has to suffer through brutal kids movies)
“Movies for Nature Lovers” (my mom loves films with nature shots)
“Movies with Amazing Soundtracks That Aren’t Musicals” (my dad hates musicals!)
“Movies with Meticulous Cinematography” (my ulterior motive to make my family into cinemaphiles!)
etc.
Why Watchlists are the perfect spot (as opposed to Playlists or Collections):
Since I already have subscriptions to all the streaming services, I like that the Watchlist feature combines all of those sources. And since I don’t want to keep those Watchlists up-to-date all the time, I like the Recommended (From This Watchlist) feature!!
All that’s missing is the ability to have MULTIPLE Watchlists (and to name them!).
The suggestion that there could be multiple Watchlists is a great one and I would vote for that as a feature request.
Another possibility might be to have Watchlist “Collections” to which one could add movies and TV shows like the Collections one can use with the Libraries.
As a last alternative, would be to have the ability to create “Tags” like the tags used here in the Community Forum and then to be able to filter the Watchlist based on the “Tags” one has assigned to movies or shows.
So, is there a way to put this feature request up for a vote to guage the community’s interest in having such a feature developed and added to the Plex application?
2024-08-31T23:00:00Z → On revisting this thread to see how it is getting on, I see that there are now a number of other new threads in which very similar requests have been made, all of which involve providing methods to organise or split watchlists or to make it possible to categorise or add tags to items in watchlists.
Perhaps there is a case for gathering all of the different use cases involving the extension of the capabilities of the Watchlist with a view to developing those enhancements that will satisfy the greatest number of them?
I tried setting up multiple profiles to solve this, but when I search for titles from other services such as Netflix it only returns results for “free on demand”. Is there a way to create separate universal watchlists for subprofiles? BTW, I selected “none” for the age restrictions when I set up the other profiles so that shouldn’t be the cause of my issue.
Adding my support. My watchlist has been growing quite a bit and it would be great to be able to organize it a bit better - either as multiple lists or even collections within watchlists.
I really hope this will be considered. For my use case, I watch a lot of shows with my wife. We both have separate user accounts on the Plex server, but when we watch something together, we watch on my user account.
This poses a problem, because I have a single watchlist, but some things I want to watch myself, and other things we want to watch together. She has her own playlist for things she wants to watch on her own. But my watchlist is always confusing for me, because I can’t remember if I’m supposed to wait to watch a particular show with her or not.
So in short, this feature would really help to keep me out of trouble for watching something on my own, when I was supposed to wait to watch with my wife.
I want to implement something like GTD in content management.
Inbox – everything by default put in here, just unsorted bookmarks
Next – something I decided to see
Some Time Maybe – something I liked but not sure I want to see the nearest time
Archive – Already watched, but sorted and grouped to different lists/collections. Something that I don’t want to remove from lists, but want to hide from main pages. Maybe share to others etc.
Please bump this request! The watchlist is very limited currently.
If I add 1 movie to the list I cannot add more movies until the movie is watched or removed. Maybe i want to add a movie to my watchlist one day and another the second day. This forces me to “Remove from Watchlist” and select a new set of movies instead of just adding to the current watchlist.
