Plex is adding new social features to the platform.
As of today, users can make and share “personalized lists on Plex of any movie, show or episode,” the company said in an announcement. Later this year, users will be able to import lists from other streaming services and react to other people’s lists.
This month, Plex will also launch a community forum that will allow people to “post and comment directly on any movie, show, season, or episode.” Later this year, Plex will introduce “Match Scores” based on a viewer’s history and past ratings to predict how much they’ll like a show or movie, Plex said.
Plex already lets people rate content, and this year it will also allow them to react with emoji. Similarly, Plex will also enable people to respond to reviews and discussions with images. The goal, per Plex’s announcement, is to bring “a new layer of expression to every conversation.”
Finally, a “Follow Anything” feature coming this year will provide users with alerts around movies, shows, actors, and crew members that they follow.
Plex’s announcement claimed that its users have already “made over 100 million watching decisions a month and created more than 45 million watchlists,” making the new capabilities relevant to how people use Plex today.
“The addition of these features marks the next step in Plex’s vision to unify entertainment discovery and help users navigate an increasingly fragmented streaming landscape,” Plex’s announcement said.
There was a Plex forum post I came across not too terribly long ago where an individual was having some sort of issue and (presumably) someone from the Plex team "took a look at [the user's] account" and rattled off a few notes which made me rather shocked as to how much detail into user setups they actually have. Given the following:
Given how selfhosting works, I would presume they would be able to provide a lot of data about the provenance of those titles and exactly who uses them and how. That, honestly, is very disconcerting to me for a multitude of reasons especially given the direction that the Plex team is moving with their product these days.
<small>Source: Ars Technica</small>
