Plex is now seeing 13 million monthly active users, with Valory forecasting user growth of 40% to 50% in 2022. The company grew its revenue by 40% last year, CEO Keith Valory told Protocol, and is looking to further accelerate that growth this year. That money has helped to build out its ad-supported video platform, which in turn has led to significant growth on all fronts. To facilitate this, Plex raised $50 million in funding last year the company followed up with another $20 million in funding earlier this year. Also planned for the coming months: the integration of transactional VOD content, aka paid movies and shows.Īll of this is part of Plex’s plan to become a one-stop shop for all things streaming media. Over time, the company plans to further personalize these recommendations by adding social features and more. In addition to universal search and a universal watchlist across multiple streaming services as well as personal media, Plex is also launching a dedicated discovery section in its app that highlights new titles on Netflix and other services. People can also add a movie or show to their watchlist and then get notified when it appears on a streaming service they subscribe to, or keep access to it even if it moves from one service to another. Movies recorded with Plex’s DVR show up alongside streaming titles from Netflix as well as Plex’s own free, ad-supported movie library, and registered users can select the services they subscribe to as their default results. The new app integration goes further and bridges people’s personal media libraries with all the content available across the streaming universe. Plex has been teasing plans for its universal watchlist for some time on its website, as Protocol was first to report in December.
Plex hopes it can avert some of those issues, and is betting on the ingenuity of its power users to help out along the way. Universal search and discovery have long been a holy grail for the streaming industry, but efforts by platform operators to integrate these types of features directly into the smart TV home screen have been held back by industry power struggles.
“You’re going to open up Plex every day,” Williams said. Instead, Williams hopes that people will just open Plex to browse everything that’s new on various streaming services, and then follow deep links to directly launch playback on Netflix, Hulu or anywhere else. “The app dance, going from app to app to find something to watch, just doesn’t make any sense,” said Plex’s senior product and design director, Jason Williams. Plex has an audacious plan to become the daily go-to app for everyone’s streaming needs: The media center app rolled out new universal search, watchlist and discovery features Tuesday that are designed to help people find and keep track of all of the shows and movies available across a growing universe of streaming services.
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