I just want to say, don’t get tunnel vision and only focus on the “ads” issue. The root of the confusion is multiple of the same media can show up under continue watching depending on what is pinned to your sidebar.
- If you have the same media in multiple libraries and they are all pinned to your sidebar, continue watching will show progress for each of those libraries. At least this you can somewhat mitigate by setting the library’s advanced setting visibility to “Exclude from home screen”.
- If you and your friend both have the same media on your servers and you have both libraries pinned to your sidebar, continue watching will show progress for libraries on both servers (if you have watch state syncing enabled).
- If you have media in your library that is also available from Plex’s VOD service and you have it pinned to your sidebar, continue watching will show progress for your library and Plex’s VOD.
It’s not an issue with Plex’s VOD service. It’s not Plex forcing ads onto users. This is how continue watching and the sidebar sources have been working for years. It was just manageable on a personal library level until Plex introduced their VOD service that caused this unintended side effect.
So again, don’t focus on the “ads”, but focus on how continue watching interacts with pinned sources in the sidebar and how this behaviour can be improved.
@morganj said they filed a related issue about this a few months ago, but for unpinned sources. I don’t know if that is relevant to this topic though.
