It is understood that Watch Together has been abandoned in favor of updates no one has or is asking for. (Perhaps the developers just don’t like their technological dependents, i.e. children/parents/grandparents/in-laws). However, given that it is one of the only ways that my family can still connect while spread out over the world, we rely on it on a daily basis. To that end, I have long ceased server and device updates to preserve the functionality.
With the forced Roku UI update, the option to use Watch Together, is no longer available, despite it being perfectly functional in the Web UI and previously operational on the Roku app. This was our last holdout feature for not moving to Jellyfin.
Please, can you add the ‘Watch Together’ button back to the Roku UI and restore at least a fragment of stability back to daily life?
Summary sentiment courtesy of Torvalds:
If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the
'UI'. We never EVER blame the user 'perspective'. How hard can this be to
understand?
WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!
Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't
break user space with TOTAL ****. I'm angry, because your whole 'UI'
was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that 'doubled-down' was so
obviously ****. The whole 'UI' is incredibly broken.
The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space,
and blaming 'the users', is just shameful. It's not how we work.
Thank you @BigWheel for your response and suggestion (vote has been added a long time ago), but this request is not actually regarding Watch Together as a server feature.
For clarification, it is adding the Watch Together UI element back into to the new Roku UI, as it was present in the prior version and functional using older server versions. Thank you for your consideration.
The server manages watch together sessions. As soon as all the apps are updated to new UI as far as I am aware watch together system in server (that keeps playback in sync) will be removed from server. Though I don’t have a date on that.
They have mentioned it is possible that it may be added back in the future but it will likely be a major overhaul to make work in new apps if it is decided to do that.
(To be clear it is not my decision and I am not saying yes or no)
And it’s the third most requested feature with over 2300 votes despite the request only be made earlier this year.
I know you didn’t make this decision but even years before the decision to pull watch together was made there were still leagues of people begging for it to be improved. I still can’t get over the fact that the devs are focusing on all of these social features but killing a legitimate social use case that has more legitimate social utility than any other social feature you’ve implemented.
I voted for that enhancement request and several thousand people have as well but it seems like it’s never going to matter just like thousands voted to allow Auto play on watch together just to see the entire feature drop.
When do feature requests become actionable by the Plex team? 2000 votes is pretty significant, it means a lot of people want that feature [back], more than some of the other things that have been added to Plex in recent years.
