Valory continues: “Another interesting category is documentaries. “You can get kids content on Netflix, but no one has done a good job of aggregating it, and giving good tools to parents, making sure kids are getting good content, science content.” “We’ve thought about kids content,” he tells TrustedReviews.
But there are plenty of other areas where Valory says Netflix simply isn’t up to scratch. He says a particular area of focus will be podcasts – and video podcasts, especially – as users have been asking for it. “We’ll look at categories that we think help round that out.” “There’s still a lot of content that they want to get, and DVR and news gets us there,” he tells us. He describes how 35% of 18-35-year-olds in the US have “already cut the cord, or never had the cord”, and are relying on services like HBO or Netflix – but those platforms don’t tick all the right boxes. We don’t want to be all things to all people, so we want to be careful about it,” explains Valory, who says Plex could be “the cord-cutters companion app”. But what’s important is that news is just the first step, with plenty more categories coming in the future. Later this year, Watchup will be integrated into Plex, giving users a taste of third-party content on an app that built its success on users providing their own entertainment. It’s a news aggregator (founded by ex-journo Adriano Farano) that melds together video content from over 150+ “credible” news sources – think CBS, CNN, Vox – and serves it up using machine learning algorithms. The first real step Plex has made towards this bold vision is the recent acquisition of Watchup. He describes this as an “absurdly audacious goal”, but says it really comes down to one simple question: “There’s an infinite amount of content – how can we organise that to make more sense?”
Speaking to TrustedReviews, Plex CEO Keith Valory said: “We want to be the way people discover and enjoy and share all of their media on all of their devices.” Your own personal Netflix, if you will.īut that’s about to change, as Plex wants to start shipping third-party content to users, rather than having viewers rely simply on their own library of goodies.
If you stuff your computer full of media, Plex allows you to watch that content remotely on your TV, or phone, or tablet. Its success stems from its unique proposition: users provide their own content.
We take a closer look at what the future holds for the popular media platform.Īlthough it pales in comparison to media app titans like Netflix, Plex is a hugely popular way to watch TV shows and movies – 10 million registered users are evidence enough. That’s because this week Plex has worked with the community on releasing a VR project started under the name “Plevr” which basically turns a Plex installation into a VR living room where you can load what you want.Exclusive: Plex could soon start surfacing documentaries, eSports, and even VR content in a bid to become the main way you watch TV, according to its CEO.
In fact, if you rely on one piece of software to catalogue, index, and stream out your software, it’s probably Plex, one of the more popular movie and TV show indexing systems out there.Īrmed with a big hard drive, Plex can turn a collection of media into your own personal Netflix, streamable all throughout your home, and now apparently your VR headset.
If you still have a lot of movies and TV shows, though, there’s a good chance they’re all sitting somewhere on a server in your home, relying on network attached storage (NAS) to send them to all parts of your home. Thanks to the small pucks that are devices like an Apple TV or the video game consoles like the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro, we rely on something else, and our media is in the cloud, found on services like Netflix and Stan and Amazon and so on, not to mention all the catch-up TV services you might login to. That big drive stored all of your movies, and in that prime position, you had your own version of Netflix well ahead of the streaming giant surfacing and going online.īut times have changed.
The home theatre PC is well and truly dead, replaced with the server and the living room, but what if you want something more personal?Ī good ten years ago, the PC was in places more than the bedroom and study, more than the office and library: it was in the living room, as well.īack then, computers were being touted as “home theatre PCs”, something which shortens nicely to “HTPC”, and provided a smallish set-top box of a thing that included all the hardware for a PC, and usually a big drive and big enough video card to drive movies and games to that big TV it usually sat next to.