If you’ve been using Plex to sync your various media across devices, platforms, and services, they have good news for you. You’ll now be able to access movies, TV shows, and documentaries for free with their ad-supported streaming service. They are promising to deliver “more content to more countries than any other free streaming service to date”. The free media will be available across all devices that support Plex and will use what’s in your library to make recommendations.
If you already have content inside Plex, then it will make it easier for them to recommend movies and TV shows for you. On your sidebar navigation and home screen, you’ll be able to see the free content and you can customize it or turn it off if you prefer not to watch these ad-supported content. If you don’t have content within the service, you’ll still be able to access the free content as they don’t require you to have a personal media collection saved there.
Obviously, to be able to offer these content for free, they need to depend on advertisers and so you’ll get ad breaks in between. This is nothing new as we’ve seen this with Hulu and Roku’s ad-supported offerings, but hopefully, the ads in Plex will not be as intrusive or as frequent as the other ones. They also assure users that ads will not make its way to the personal content that you’ve saved in their servers.
The content will stream up to 1080p quality and your progress will be synced across devices as well. They will eventually add other enhancements like improved subtitle support, better discoverability, and also a watchlist feature to keep track of the titles you want to watch later on. As to the quality of the content, they say they will be mixing classics with newer hits and even some obscure ones for discoverability.
If you don’t have Plex installed yet, now is the time to try it out. If you’re not averse to having ads disturb you every once in a while and you want to have free content, then best to explore their new free streaming service.
