Summary
- Plex has announced new social features: lists, discussions, match scores, reactions, and more.
- These features are releasing in a staggered rollout — lists are available now in limited form, discussions will come in June, and the remaining features will roll out throughout the year.
- The features don’t seem like enough to turn sentiment around amid the backlash over upcoming price hikes.
On June 3, Plex announced several new social features designed to help aid discovery on its streaming platform. Unfortunately, in light of the massive price hike announced last month, these features are falling a little flat.
New social features in Plex
The streaming platform announced six new social and sharing features designed to help you discover and share content:
- Lists: You can now create and share personalized lists containing any movie or show. Later this year, this functionality will expand to allow you to import lists from other platforms and react and comment on your friends’ lists.
- Discussions: Plex is adding a community forum where you can post and comment on any movie or show, “surfacing conversations” around content.
- Match Score: This is a proprietary scoring system that attempts to predict how much you’ll like a movie or show. It’s based on past ratings and viewing history.
- Content Reactions: You’ll have the ability to add emoji reactions to titles, in addition to star ratings.
- Follow Anything: You’ll now be able to follow movies, shows, cast, and crew, and get alerts when there’s new activity.
- Comment with Images: You’ll be able to react to reviews, discussions, and more using images.
Availability of these features is mixed: lists are available now in a limited form, with updates coming later this year. Discussions will be available this month (June), while everything else will roll out gradually over the rest of the year.
Plex needs to get its priorities in order
A social platform is not what the service needs
At first glance, some of these features seem kind of silly (who cares about emoji reactions and image replies?). However, some actually look genuinely useful — for example, being able to follow lists to keep up with what your friends are watching could be a great feature. Recommendations have potential for the right user, too.
The problem here is that these are being announced at a time when user sentiment toward Plex is perhaps at an all-time low. With the impending $500 price increase on the lifetime pass, there’s been a lot of discussion about the platform’s value and whether it’s still worth using.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that these were already planned, and the timing is just a poor coincidence. But to the cynical part of me, it sure seems like Plex is announcing these features — most of which aren’t even ready for release — to add perceived value to the service, and this just isn’t nearly enough.
Reactions are understandably salty
Predictably, folks online are not receiving the announcement with much excitement:
What do you think? Are you interested in social features on your streaming platforms, or would you rather that Plex go back to basics? Drop us a comment and let us know.
