Plex Goes Social for Content Discovery, Adds Music Channels

Free streaming media service Plex is testing a new community-oriented feature called Discover Together that lets users add friends and keep tabs on their favorite programs, viewing their ratings and bookmarks. In addition to enhancing engagement by prompting online discussions, Plex hopes the crowd-sourced community data can eventually help power its recommendation engine. The idea is for Discover Together to launch with a high degree of privacy, inviting users to fill out Plex profiles with their geographic location and Plex Pass status, extending individual friend invites using a Plex username or email. The feature is currently in beta for web, iOS and Android users.

Initially there won’t be the capacity to upload address books or push friend recommendations. Discover Together “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,” writes TechCrunch, which says the idea is to make Plex “not just a streaming hub, but a streaming community.”

Plex users who opt-in will be able to choose which in-app activities they wish 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,” reports TechCrunch, adding that “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’s Activity feed.”

In other news, Plex has expanded its live TV lineup, added 18 new channels, most of them music-focused, Fierce Video reports, noting 16 of them are provided by “music and in-store media solutions provider Stingray.” These include an array of collections based on music genres and themes. The platform also added INFAST, a channel built around “fun & amazing stories to ignite your imagination.”

Plex is available in more than 180 countries on platforms including Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Xbox, offering a content lineup of more than 50,000 free titles, on-demand movies and TV shows, “and hundreds of free-to-stream live TV channels,” per Fierce Video, which notes that last year “Plex raised $50 million in a growth equity round from existing investor Intercap, with plans to use the funds to build out the commercial side of the business including marketing, monetization and content.”

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