Inside Plex's Quest To Become a One-Stop Shop for Digital Media

Get ready for yet another ad-supported video service: Media center app maker Plex is gearing up to add free movies and TV shows to its app, starting with content from Warner Bros. From a report: Plex announced a deal with Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution Thursday, which will allow it to add a still-unspecified amount of the studio's movie catalog to its app when it launches ad-supported video streaming later this year. But Plex isn't just looking to compete with ad-supported video services like Tubi and Pluto. Instead, the company is aiming to turn its app into a kind of one-stop-shop for digital media, capable of serving up anything you might want. To that end, Plex has plans to begin reselling video subscription services via its app, and add transactional VOD, in the first half of 2020.

"You shouldn't have to go to a lot of different apps to get the content you care about," said Plex CEO Keith Valory in a recent conversation with Variety. "This is going to be the one place for the media that matters most to you," added the company's vice president of marketing Scott Hancock. Plex executives know that they will never be able to offer access to everything you might want to watch -- Netflix originals in particular will likely not be available any time soon. However, they are confident that they'll be able to serve up much of the rest, including movies, TV shows, podcasts, news and webisodes. "75-85% of the content you care about, you'll get in one beautiful app," Valory said.

Jellyfin

[bluelip]

Skip Plex and Emby. Use Jellyfin.

At least for now.

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[richy freeway]

Currently running Plex (lifetime subscription), but this JellyFin looks interesting. Will be installing it tonight to run alongside Plex and see how it goes.

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[bsharitt]

I started looking into Jellyfin recently, but it looks like the Roku app is still a work in progress. Might look into contributing if it helps getting it up and running faster. I'd been looking at writing something from scratch to replace Plex, but this look like an easier route. Seems like as soon as some application does something well, the developers always feel the need to "pivot" and screw things up and start adding a bunch of garbage the original users didn't wan't.

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[sparky8251]

I can say without a doubt that we would welcome *anyone* that wants to work on our projects. Roku functions but needs work before it can be published. Anyone that wants to see the app ready and on the store sooner should contribute if they can. We have the money and can put together build infra, we just have very fwe current users with a Roku due to the lack of a Roku client making contributors hard to come by :P We have chat on matrix and freenode, so please come and join us!

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[DaFallus]

I can say without a doubt that we would welcome *anyone* that wants to work on our projects. Roku functions but needs work before it can be published. Anyone that wants to see the app ready and on the store sooner should contribute if they can. We have the money and can put together build infra, we just have very fwe current users with a Roku due to the lack of a Roku client making contributors hard to come by :P We have chat on matrix and freenode, so please come and join us!

How about a Samsung smart TV app? I'd love to try some alternatives but without a Samsung smart TV app it won't work for my users (wife and kids).

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[DaFallus]

Skip Plex and Emby. Use Jellyfin.

At least for now.

Jellyfin is ok if you're watching videos on a device with a browser. If you're using a smart TV then it isn't an option without a separate device. And yes, I know people here hate on smart TVs but they probably don't have a wife who just wants a simple, single, easy to use interface through one remote. Plex provides this, so Plex is what I'm currently using.

This is not a Netflix like app

[aristofeles]

You may get Plex on your Smart TV or other device. But the interface and the experience will be.. good luck. Great on some, terrible on other. Maybe with dolby digital sound, maybe with 4K support, maybe without any of those.
Unfortunately the last is the case on my 65" Panasonic TV. But it's a great set for 4K HDR on both Netflix and Amazon Prime.

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[Anubis IV]

You may get Plex on your Smart TV or other device. But the interface and the experience will be.. good luck. Great on some, terrible on other.

They're actually in the process of rolling out a unified interface across all of theirs apps at the moment. At this point, all of the devices on which I typically use Plex (e.g. web, smartphone, tablet, set-top box) are updated, though I don't know that they've rolled the interface out to legacy gaming consoles and smart TVs. And, unlike most interface changes, I actually really liked this one right from the get-go. They let you customize things far more than before, they've reduced the number of taps/click

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[drinkypoo]

As for the technical side of things, at least some of that boils down to the device itself. For much of its history, Plex relied on the client device doing its own decoding, so Plex was limited to whatever formats the client device natively supported.

It's been a long time since I used Plex, but I thought it transcoded specifically to deal with problems like this, and has for many years? I found it irritating and used PS3MediaServer to stream to my devices instead, for a while. Everything I have now runs Kodi, so I'm fairly content. (I do wish they would come up with some kind of simple metadata server install, though.)

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[Anubis IV]

I thought it transcoded specifically to deal with problems like this

Transcoding doesn't deal with the problem I was describing. I mean, yes, they transcode and have been all along, but what I was suggesting is that they were in many cases transcoding to the lowest common denominator formats since it wasn't worth their effort to support transcoding to each and every variation of each and every format. I.e. They'd transcode to something natively supported by the device, but not necessarily the best format natively supported by the device. A software decoder in the Plex client

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[gbjbaanb]

but that still doesn't make sense - you tell the server what the capabilities of your client are and then the server transcodes to that format.

So all they need to do is get better at figuring out the best stream for each client, which they have to do anyway!

I have had issues playing on a WD Live, updated the config xml on the server, and then it worked fine - direct streaming included. Why would you even want to transcode on a potentially crappy client box that barely has enough CPU to process the UI naviga

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[gbjbaanb]

Yep, you'd think a file-streaming service owuld prioritise good video and sound, people like movies with 5.1, even if they only have a soundbar it does a reasonable job of outputting something decent - but no, Plex thinks that plain stereo is sufficient.

That kind of attitude will kill them, its find thinking of always moving forward with new stuff, but not if it leave a trail of part broken apps in its wake.

Yeah, no to Plex

[DarkRookie2]

I am not making an account to use something for local content.

Didn’t look into it very hard, eh?

[phayes]

Some Plex apps like that on my LG TV force you to use an ID even for local only content but others like the Plex app on my Apple TV4K don’t. The PlexWeb UI in particular does not and that is why (before buying my ATV4K) I bookmarked the PlexWeb URL on my TV’s browser and used that instead of the LG TV app.

Now I just use the ATV4K — no login required.

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[Solandri]

It's not quite that simple. If you ever used a Plex account and there are traces of it somewhere (browser cookie, server config file, etc), the Plex server will force you to login to the account to use it (even to access local content). You can't even reconfigure the Plex server, as they've set it up so the server's local config page redirects you to an online account login page (meaning you can't reconfigure your server if the Internet is down) if it knows you've used an account in the past.

So a lot of

Oh FFS

[sootman]

If you can't get 100% of your content from one place, it will NOT be one-stop shopping.

"This is going to be the one place for the media that matters most to you..." ... "75-85% of the content you care about, you'll get in one beautiful app"

How clever of you to assume that you're going to just HAPPEN to license all the content that I want. I'm pretty sure it will be full of 90% of shit I DON'T care about, and 2/3 of what I want to watch will be in the 10-25% that you DON'T have. Just like everything is now. The most desired content is ALWAYS the hardest for any player to get a license for.

"Netflix originals in particular will likely not be available any time soon."

You don't say? Well, luckily hardly anybody wants to watch Netflix's highly-regarded, immensely popular shows.

Here's another short list of content that will never arrive on Plex: https://www.titlemax.com/disco... [titlemax.com]

But other than that, yeah, sounds like it'll be a fucking gold mine.

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[omnichad]

Worse than that, they don't get ad revenue sharing when you don't watch the stuff on offer. That means it will just clog up the UI if you don't use this and you'll see pop-ups and banners for ad-supported shows vomited all over the place.

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[Retired ICS]

You mean like NetFlix does with their originals, which they now vomit all over the place?

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[omnichad]

Nothing at all like that. For one, it's part of the subscriber fee. For another, there is no good way to find out about them. There are just so many worldwide.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

They have been changing

[stikves]

They have been changing Plex from your own media server source to another streaming service. In each iteration there is backlash, and Plex would give some concessions, but it is not hard to see the writing on the wall.

For example:
https://support.plex.tv/articl... [support.plex.tv]
    "Do I need a Plex account to stream locally?"
    "The longer answer is: “No, it’s not required, but you really should sign in because it only helps you.”"

You can still host everything locally, or stream only your content. But then the directory based browsing is hidden for the new home page view, and the app design is making manual organization and curation much more difficult.

I am still keeping my account, since I had paid for lifetime plex pass, but eventually I might need to switch as well (even though I would pretty much to keep it as is).

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[casualgeek]

Yeah I gave up on Plex a few years ago when it was starting to become annoying with mandatory account, and it was becoming clear they were moving away from "do your own media server with a cool interface".

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[kalpol]

I started moving away from them when the MythTV plugin quit working a while back. They still have a good mobile interface which makes it really easy to stream my music on my VPN-connected mobile device (without creating any sort of account). Other than that Kodi is pretty much all there.

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[jwhyche]

Never fails to amuse me when some thing gets popular how people will turn on it. I've used all kinds of "10-foot" interfaces, media portal, xbrc, mythtv, and several others. Plex, so far, has been the best of the lot. It doesn't matter what device I use it on it just works.

So if the plex people figure out how to make money off the system , more power to them.

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[Solandri]

The account isn't mandatory. Plex is just really, really good at hiding the fact that it isn't mandatory. I created an account and logged in thinking it was mandatory. But a few updates ago Plex stopped working when my Internet was down, even though all I wanted to do was access content on my local media server. It couldn't phone home so refused to let me use it. And I couldn't use the local Plex server configuration page since it auto-forwarded the config URL (which I had bookmarked) to their online lo

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[jon3k]

Kodi can work surprisingly well as a replacement depending on how you use Plex.

Bullshit

[lFaRptHjbZDI]

There's no way a serious company that really wants to be the "One-Stop Shop for Digital Media" would go a decade refusing to support CUE+WAV or CUE+FLAC for music. What a bunch of ass clowns.

Plex doesn't work without an internet connection

[Jody Bruchon]

I have a Plex TV app and a Plex server on the same LAN. If the internet goes out and I don't already have Plex running and linked, I can't use the Plex app to access the Plex library. Yes, I've whitelisted no-account access over any LAN IP in Plex Media Server, but the TV app still requires the ability to phone home to Plex's authentication service to access LOCAL Plex servers. It's bullshit. If they weren't literally the only service that worked well on the TV for accessing media stored on a computer on th