The Plex streaming service has long since grown beyond its original focus of being a home for personal media to offer a more comprehensive solution for discovering, streaming and sharing content across services, including free Plex TV and movies supported from advertisements. Recently, the company added social networking features, which it is expanding today with the introduction of new functionality. Notably, this includes a way to share your Plex profile publicly and tools to let others read your TV and movie reviews and then comment in return.
Plex first introduced social networking in November 2023 when it launched a feature called “Discover Together,” which allowed users to create profiles on the service and then find and follow friends to see what they were watching. (The feature initially received some backlash after some Plex users were unhappy about its intrusive nature. Plex now notes that content marked as adult will not appear in user activity rates, which was one of the concerns of users .)
While it was a change for the company, offering a more social experience on Plex allows it to better compete not only with other free, ad-supported streamers, but also with social networks dedicated to movie and TV reviews like Letterboxd and TV Time, among others. .
With today’s release, Plex says users will now be able to share a public URL that points to their profile on the service at watch.plex.tv. By default, users will be discoverable by others in Plex via in-app search, unless they’ve already disabled this in their settings.
People who view your user profile will be able to see what you’ve seen, what’s on your watchlist, and more. This doesn’t change any of your existing privacy settings, Plex notes.
In addition, Plex users will have the option to make their ratings and reviews visible to other Plex users through a new setting. Here, you can choose between allowing anyone to see these comments or only those logged into Plex. You can also choose to have your comments visible only to Friends or Friends of Friends, or you can make all your ratings and comments private if you prefer.
In addition to its social networking features, Plex is also launching a preview of its new user interface, first on Apple TV. The redesign includes updated navigation, more personal media customization, easier access to features, a richer experience with more artwork and different Plex social networking features, the company says in its announcement.
For power users, Plex Pass subscribers (paid users) will have access to HEVC hardware encoding for better video quality while saving bandwidth. This option was previously in preview mode with selected users, but is now available to all subscribers.
