Streaming service Plex 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 Plex’s own ad-supported free TV and movies. More recently, the company added social networking features, which it’s today expanding with its rollout 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 as some Plex users were unhappy about its opt-out nature. Plex now notes that content flagged as adult won’t appear in users’ Activity fees, which was one of the users’ concerns.)
While it was a shift 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 dedicated social networks for 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 on watch.plex.tv. By default, users will be findable by others on Plex via the app’s search, unless they’ve already turned this off in their settings.
People who view your user profile will be able to see what you’ve been watching, what’s on your Watchlist, and more. This does not change any of your existing privacy settings, Plex notes.
In addition, Plex users will have the option to make their Ratings & Reviews visible to other users on Plex through a new setting. Here, you can choose between allowing anyone to see these reviews or only those signed in to Plex. You can also choose that your reviews are only visible to Friends or Friends of Friends, or you can make all your Ratings & Reviews private if desired.
Alongside the social networking features, Plex is also launching a preview of its new user interface, initially on Apple TV. The redesign includes updated navigation, more personal media customization, easier feature access, a richer experience with more artwork, and Plex’s various social networking features, the company says in its announcement.
For power users, Plex Pass subscribers (paid users) will gain access to HEVC hardware encoding for better video quality while saving bandwidth. This option was previously in preview mode with select users but is now available to all subscribers.
