The “group movies” thread made me wonder if PLEX ever lets anyone know what features are in their development pipeline? That discussion started six years ago. At one point a Plex Employee named “BigWheel” said, “The devs and employees are never, let me repeat that , are never going to promise anything or give you release times for anything. as a company policy.” That response came three years after the thread started. Three years. A year later there was another comment from BigWheel that said, yeah, we understand what you want but we can’t say if we are doing anything about it. “They are not going to respond, Plex does not say yes or no to feature requests.”
I’m not sure anyone is asking for a promise or a delivery date. What they want is some acknowlegement that yeah, good idea, we’ll work on it. Oh, and here are the other things we are working on.
I spent a lot of time with Salesforce and their user community has a forum not unlike this where people can post ideas for feature enhancments. Then everyone gets to vote for the ones they really like. The ones that get the most votes float to the top of the list and the idea at the top actually do get done. Annually the company makes a big deal about how many ideas from the idea board are now part of the product. They listen and their customers like the fact that the company is working on things they might actually want instead of stuff they don’t.
I know you have to have a PLEX Pass to even SEE a forum where you can post product suggestions (which seems odd since I might actually buy a PLEX Pass if I thought PLEX might listen to anyone with a good idea). From what I hear, PLEX doesn’t comment on that forum much either. Things sit on that list for years. So what are they doing and do they care what their users want and how would we know that? For all we know the reason that specific feature isn’t implemented is because PLEX keeps no database of films and has no way to actually do it. It pulls individual information from IMDB or whatever and unless there is a website out there somewhere that knows all the movies in a given group, it has no way to do it. If this is the case, just say so. Not sure how other competing programs do it but they can and PLEX can’t and it might be useful to PLEX to keep that in mind because we do.
So how are product feature requests handled and what should we expect in the future?
yup.
This whole hiding a portion of the forum from non-plex-pass holders is quite odd.
It reduces potential sales (for many reasons including ones you’ve listed) and creates a division (again reasons you’ve posted, as well as links for help to posts that error out).
there are lots of companies that don’t tell people what they are working on. Apple comes to mind. I guess there can be a competitive issue of telling people your pipeline and then having a competitor beat you to it. It does make me wonder who PLEX thinks their competition is? Or for that matter, who is their target customer ongoing?
When media servers like PLEX and KODI (XBMC) got started, I kind of saw them as catering to the media collector slash hoarders slash pirates that wanted a way to stream the media they had on banks of hard drives. I’m not sure how many people fit that demographic anymore. I may have thousands of movies but fewer and fewer people do and you can’t build a company that dedicated resources to adding features to that segment when the growing segment are the cord cutters who just want to stream video and watch TV without buying cable.
In that way PLEX may be competing with ROKU, AppleTV, and AmazonFire instead of any other local media streaming server. If this is true, then there are good odds that features like movie grouping just do’nt make the cut.
Yeah I’ve really been hoping to have the ability to share playlists with users. While it seems like it’s a feature just makes sense for Plex, I have no indication if it will ever happen at all, and there’s been a feature request for years. So my thoughts are either they don’t see it as a value to the user, or there’s some unsurmountable engineering problem that makes it impossible.
I keep hoping that some of these “smaller” (smaller as in group movies < Plex Cloud) features we’ve been requested will all get taken care of in some big 2.0 release.
I would love audio book libraries, the ability to nest/group libraries, movie groups, extended use of music tags like composer, easier updating of PART of a library. But these are features for people who have lots of media and want to create their own Netflix. These are not the features for cord cutters who have little if any media of their own and just want a media server for their private use. I’m 57 and I have over 4 terabytes of music files. My son has no CDs and one 28 year old co-worker not only has no CDs, he has no mp3s. He has Spotify. So I would expect a Spotify Channel before any of that stuff.
