Reading over the information and FAQ about Video on Demand, I am curious if any information has been release on how they are doing it. Considering Plex is a media service, did they build their own infrastructure to host this streaming content or outsource it to someone else? Would be cool to know the plex server to could scale to this level.
Excellent question! Its a combination of internal technologies and outsourced services (which we may continue with or bring in-house). The basic gist of it is we handle all partner transfers, ingestion, metadata matching, and encoding. Content comes directly from the studios and distributors with licenses. Encoding is H.264 and streaming is HLS/DASH over CDN (the outsourced part). Each title has multiple renditions at different bitrates and resolutions, which dynamically provides you with the best stream for your network conditions/playback device. Similar to other streaming services, the rendition you get can change throughout playback based on network conditions.
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I’m happy to geek out more, just not sure how much detail you desire 
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I see this as a win, despite the whining about ads that I’ve seen. Say I have issues with my own server setup for movies, there’s at least something else, that already is equipped to lift the weight off my shoulders as far as resources. I see this a lot where we as Server admins have to plan ahead for transcoding conditions but what you guys have is the ultimate movie and tv helper when we have a bad server day. I only have 16TB of storage but it would be impossible for me to have every rendition stored ready to go for playback at whim. I don’t know about others, but thank you for the added bonus you provided. Can I get editable playlist cover art now? * wink wink *
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I agree! It’s actually amazing how often people come into Plex expecting there to be content ready-to-watch from the first login. This gives folks something for free (albeit with ads), while they get to know Plex and get share invites from their family and friends. It’s very possible that we will have a subset of users who are served with the growing collection of ad-based content and never end up streaming from someone’s PMS.
Please share information on streaming resolutions, bit rate and audio quality/codecs offered.
I am glad you mentioned that the free content is ad-based. I was specifically looking for that information. Not saying that it isn’t fair, since it is free content… but it allows me to choose whether to host my own or indulge in the ad-supported free content.
Bitrates and resolutions is subject to change, as we optimize, and adjust in the future, but here’s a general look at what you could be getting. Also note that not every file will match this exactly.
480 x 270 @ 449 kbps
640 x 360 @ 698 kbps
640 x 360 @ 899 kbps
960 x 540 @ 1198 kbps
960 x 540 @ 1693 kbps
1280 x 720 @ 1990 kbps
1920 x 1080 @ 3489 kbps
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Thank you, Kino. And audio quality/codecs offered?
For streaming, we’re using either AAC or AC-3. 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround, depending on what the studio provides. Whenever its available, we obviously take 5.1 and will handle our own 2.0 mixdown for devices that need it.
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Thank you! I appreciate the info.
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I mentioned this in another topic, but think it’s worthy of including here as well. The source material we receive can vary between studios and distributors. The bigger name studios tend to provide us with better quality, though I would say that not all indie distributors give us poor quality; some provide very high quality, while others are not. We get a range of audio/video formats, but for the large part our source material is either ProRes or H.264. ProRes files are huge, coming in at 120-180GB per feature. While the quality is fantastic, it poses logistical challenges (which I experience first hand!) when transferring and processing hundreds at a time. Fortunately, many of our partners provide us with H.264 encodes, which are much more transportable.
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@kinoCharlino If there happens to be a show where an episode is listed twice, how would one go about letting you guys know?
Also, based on that and what you said, your setup is slightly different from how a normal users library works. For instance, the episode is listed twice and not like our library where I believe it would have the little 2 icon in the right corner of the thumbnail. You also have the “categories” (for lack of a better word) whereas in our libraries if we go to movies it’s just all our movies (unless you filter on a different genre). Though we do kind of get that in the Recommended section, it appears more limited for us.
Any chance anything from this addition (organization-wise or feature-wise more-so) will get implemented to our own libraries? As an example, it would be nice, on top of having the full library view like we have no, to have the genre breakdowns (I know other streaming services do that, but it would be similar to what you have now, at least on the web app) and seeing movies/tv shows from our library under specific genres. It would almost be like an easier way to filter. Maybe make it so the admin can control it (how many genres are shown, does it get shown at all, etc.).
Really fascinating info that you provided. I for one would definitely have no issue with you going into more detail (where you can) on how it works behind the scenes.
-Shark2k
This information is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks. If you guys ever bring in house, please send out an email. I would love to apply for a job working on that. I am always curious after using Plex how companies setup the backend to encode all these videos like Plex does.
From the “banner” post:
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When people like my own family complain about their $12 going to Netflix, I send them to this article about how Netflix more or less use to work. They stop reading after the first paragraph. They don’t care because they don’t know what really goes into something behind the scenes. But then they throw out verbiage like “I just don’t understand!” - Then READ!
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Nice catch! Report it using the link to the form in this post: Video On Demand Info
This service is a bit different than a typical Plex Media Server. It’s not “PMS in the cloud” but does borrow technologies. The categories you mention we refer to them as “hubs.” They include automatically generated and also human curated hubs. We plan on doing a lot more with human-curated hubs.
More ways to browse this catalog are coming 
I’m a fan of browse by genre.
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This has been a huge learning experience for us! From the studio business/licensing side, to making sure when users hit “play” that the content begins right away, across all our supported devices and apps. We’re getting solid feedback to work from on day one and see this as a good start for us. I’m happy to share more. Anything specific you are curious about?
I could just take care of this right now. What’s the TV show name, season, and episode number?
" I could just take care of this right now." Kino has magical hands after all.
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