{"id":1173308,"date":"2022-08-10T19:19:19","date_gmt":"2022-08-10T19:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/08\/10\/plex-introduces-a-social-experience-to-its-streaming-app-with-launch-of-discover-together\/"},"modified":"2022-08-10T19:19:19","modified_gmt":"2022-08-10T19:19:19","slug":"plex-introduces-a-social-experience-to-its-streaming-app-with-launch-of-discover-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/08\/10\/plex-introduces-a-social-experience-to-its-streaming-app-with-launch-of-discover-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Plex introduces a social experience to its streaming app with launch of \u2018Discover Together\u2019 \u2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Streaming media platform\u00a0Plex, already an expansive service for personal media, free streaming TV, and new content discovery, is venturing into a new area with today\u2019s launch of a new feature, Discover Together. The friends-focused feature is laying the groundwork to develop Plex as not just a streaming hub, but a streaming community. Initially, this includes the ability to add friends and see what they\u2019re watching, bookmarking and how they\u2019re rating shows and movies.<\/p>\n

Over time, Plex plans to leverage community engagement to help power its recommendations and, potentially, allow for streamers to engage in discussions around favorite content. This could help the service better compete with online TV communities like TV Time, which combines a TV show tracker with active discussions around shows, movies, and individual episodes.<\/p>\n

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At launch, however, the Discover Together feature will remain fairly private. Plex users can fill out their profile on the app with information about their Plex Pass status, location, and more, then add friends individually using their Plex email or username. There is no address book upload or contact matching feature built-in at this time. Users can also choose which parts of their in-app activity they want to make visible to friends. Items including their Watchlist, Watch History and Ratings can each be set to either Private or Friends Only depending on what parts of your Plex usage you want to share.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even if you set all items to be visible to friends, you can still hide select activities on an individual basis from the Discover section\u2019s Activity feed. Here, you\u2019ll tap on the three-dot menu next to items you\u2019ve watched, watchlisted, or rated to hide them, if you choose. (So, for instance, if you don\u2019t want your friends to know you\u2019ve been binging your way through cheesy reality TV shows, you can remove those from being seen in their feeds, while keeping track of your episode viewing privately.)<\/p>\n

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Image Credits:<\/strong> Plex<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

After adding friends on the service, you\u2019ll be able to scroll through the Activity feed to see what shows and movies they\u2019ve been watching, saving and rating. Plex is considering a feature that would display your friends\u2019 ratings on a show or movie\u2019s title page, as well, alongside the Rotton Tomatoes ratings. But for the time being, the app will simply highlight if a friend has engaged with a title in an area below the \u201cAdd to Watchlist\u201d button. You can click on that banner to see a curated stream of your friends\u2019 activities with the show or movie in question.<\/p>\n

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Image Credits:<\/strong> Plex<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From the Activity feed, you can communicate privately with friends through an in-app messaging feature available from a chat icon below their posts. This isn\u2019t meant to be a fully-featured messaging client, but rather a way to send a quick text about the movie or show, which they can reply to. You can also share a title and a message directly with a friend or even a group of friends by clicking the Share icon on the title\u2019s page in the app.<\/p>\n

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Image Credits:<\/strong> Plex<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

While in the past, Plex has launched its new features to all users in a more public format, it\u2019s rolling out the beta test of Discover Together by announcing it in its forums and allowing users to opt-in. This way, Plex can ramp up the number of users for the feature more slowly, as each new user will need to invite their friends to the service to get started.<\/p>\n

The feature is being beta tested on the web, iOS, and Android. It follows a major update to the streaming media platform this April which delivered a number of new additions including a universal watchlist, cross-service search and new discovery features \u2014 including the new Discover section where the Discover Together feature is now housed.<\/p>\n

Plex believes the long-term potential for its community features will allow it to turn its app into a more social experience and a second-screen companion for TV viewing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the early goals\u2026is to start sharing and getting recommendations from friends,\u201d explains Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski. \u201cThat\u2019s how so many recommendations are made and shared in the real world and there\u2019s just no concrete platform for doing that today. Our belief is that it should be integrated into the experience,\u201d he continued.\u201dIt should just feel part of the fabric of the ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Streaming media platform\u00a0Plex, already an expansive service for personal media, free streaming TV, and new content discovery, is venturing into a new area with today\u2019s launch of a new feature, Discover Together. The friends-focused feature is laying the groundwork to develop Plex as not just a streaming hub, but a streaming community. Initially, this includes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1173310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1173308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1173308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1173308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1173308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1173308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}