Media software startup and streaming service provider Plex is broadening its offerings beyond media organization and content streaming, aiming to transform into a social network. Today, the company is introducing a new feature called “Discover Together.” This feature allows users to create profiles, connect with friends, and jointly explore new TV shows and movies. While initially introduced in beta testing last summer, Discover Together has now received updates and expanded availability to a broader user base.
Plex’s vision is to evolve from a simple streaming platform into a vibrant streaming community. With Discover Together, users can add friends to discover what shows and movies their friends are watching, bookmarking for later, and how they rate the content they’ve consumed.
In the long run, Plex plans to use these personal recommendations to enhance its own content suggestions and facilitate discussions among streamers regarding their favorite content. This move puts Plex in competition with other online TV and movie communities such as Letterboxd for film enthusiasts and TV Time, which combines content tracking with active discussion forums.
Plex’s Discover feature, accessible from the app’s main menu, includes four primary tabs:
Discover: This tab displays trending content across Plex and the user’s configured streaming services. Users can see popular content, trailers, and trending content by genre.
Profile: In this section, users can personalize their social networking profile within Plex by adding a profile photo, location, bio, and other information. Friends can view the user’s Watch History, watchlisted items, and their content ratings. Users can also set privacy levels for their content ratings.
People: This tab enables users to search for new friends based on name, location, or shared interests. Users can also view a person’s friends list, browse friend suggestions, and expand their social network.
Activity: Similar to a News Feed, the Activity tab allows users to track their friends’ actions on the social networking side of Plex. This includes tracking watchlisted items, marked items as watched, or comments on shows and movies.
Plex intends to leverage this friend activity data to suggest popular shows among friends each week, enhancing the user experience.
Plex has also made other updates to its software, such as allowing users to report issues with media content. These reports will be sent to the server owner via email.
Discover Together is available on Plex’s website, mobile app, and TV apps for various streaming media players, including Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Google TV, Roku, smart TVs (LG, Hisense, Samsung, Sony, Vizio), game consoles, and tablets, among others.
