Plex officially launched its Discover Together feature, which turns the universal media player app into something like Facebook for movie and TV lovers by combining user profiles and your friends’ favorite flicks and shows to discover, share, and connect with them. But is full of ability to comment. , Anyone with a free Plex account can create a profile and instantly find their friends (or possibly make new ones) on the Plex platform.
The new feature can be found within the Discover tab on the web, TV, and mobile versions of the Plex client.
If you’ve ever struggled to find good recommendations from your favorite streaming services — even the ones that tout fancy AI-powered recommendation engines — Plex’s Discover Together could prove extremely useful. Instead of waiting for an algorithm (or a marketing employee) to put something interesting on your home screen, Plex lets you join in on your friends’ media-viewing activity, regardless of what streaming service they’re using.
The newly revamped Discover tab has sub-sections for Trending, Activity, People and Profile. The Trending tab is effectively the old Discover home page, with highlighted media from your selected streaming services. Activity is where you’ll see the latest activity shared by your Plex friends, while the People tab lets you see Plex’s suggestions for your existing friends as well as friends you want to add. The My Profile tab is about your shared and private activity on the platform.
Activities like rating a movie or show, adding a title to your watchlist, or simply indicating that you’ve watched something are potential areas of interaction with your Plex friends. If a friend sees that you have given john wick 4 Rating five stars, they can comment on that activity, starting a thread that you both can use to discuss the movie. If your other friends want, they can also join the discussion, just like a Facebook post.
When you share a title, you can share it with one person on your friends list, or create a group of friends to share it with. Anyone in the group can comment on a shared show or movie, which can be a good way to keep some boring chats going between friends who will appreciate them.
Commenting is possible from both the web and mobile Plex clients, while the TV version of Plex will be limited to viewing activities and comments.
Since privacy is obviously important to keep Discover Together from becoming the Wild West, once your profile is created, you can set privacy levels for your Plex friends list, your watchlist, your ratings, and your watch history . These can be set to Friends Only, Friends of Friends, and Private. There is currently no fully public activity in Discover Together. At any time, you can mute or completely block a Plex friend.
At the moment, leveraging your group of Plex friends to watch something is a manual process – you have to dive into your friends’ activity to see what they watched and enjoyed. However, Plex is considering future improvements that will make this process more automated by actively finding movies and shows for you that your friends have enjoyed.
The Plex app is available for nearly every device and platform, including game consoles, streaming media devices, smart TVs, smartphones, and tablets, as well as the web.
