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Movies Television Entertainment Technology

Plex Launches Free, Ad-Supported Video Service in 200-Plus Countries, Territories (variety.com) 35

Media center app maker Plex officially launched its ad-supported video service with movies and TV shows from MGM, Warner Bros., Lionsgate and Legendary Wednesday. The service will be available in more than 200 countries and territories, making it the first ad-supported video service with a nearly global reach. From a report: Getting the rights to launch in so many countries was key to bringing ad-supported video to Plex, said CEO Keith Valory in a recent interview with Variety. "More than half of our users are outside of the U.S." The initial catalog will include thousands of movies and TV show episodes, according to Plex executives, with plans to add many more over time. Some titles will only be streaming in some territories, while others are being made available everywhere. At launch, users will have access to movies like "Rain Man," "Teen Wolf," "The Terminator," "American Ultra," "Frequency," "Hard Candy," "Ghost in the Shell," and more. Plex's free-to-watch catalog will initially be more heavily focused on movies than TV shows, but the company plans to add more TV content in the coming months.
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Plex Launches Free, Ad-Supported Video Service in 200-Plus Countries, Territories

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  • Do they have other great films like the Phantom (96)? Can't wait!!
    • The Phantom is currently on amazon prime for free, so is teen wolf the series
    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Frequency wasn't really that bad of a movie.

      Also, gotta love Wikipedia rabbit holes. It led me from The Phantom(horrible movie) to The Stupids(an even worse movie)(both of which were nominated for the same crappy movie awards) to The Battle of Algiers(an excellent movie, and one that has literally been used as a training film for both insurgent and government counterinsurgency groups including the DoD)(whose director had a cameo in The Stupids).

    • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      I just looked through it. They do have some good old movies and a bunch of crap. Nothing there that I saw to wright home about out. If you have a Ruko there are number of free channels out there that pretty much offer the same line up.

  • Plex sure has drive into left field since being an OS X fork of XBMC.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @10:24AM (#59484084)

    Slashdotters in the USoA have it easy. With a cornucopia of services, each with a plethora of content to choose from.

    We, in backwater countries are not so lucky. we do not have that many services, and the ones we have, have limited content.

    So, any service that launches in 200+ geographies, even an add-supported one, is a welcome addition to our arsenal. It may be time to re-install plex on my (atom)Synology, and see what the fuss is all about.

    And yes, If I had the money to pay for a Syno 1515+, I have also the money to pay for other streaming services, but there is less choice here, and geoblocks mean that even netflix makes us jump trough hoops (VPN, wink wink) to get to the stuff we want. With the crappy download speeds around here, the overhead of the VPN means I have to watch in 720p TOPS, instead of 1080p... So, a service that is not geoblocked in my location is a welcome addition.

  • Bloated software full of features that no one wants. N.b., Adobe, Intuit, et al. Plex has added shit like Tidal that 99%+ of its users just want to disable. The only decent thing they've done in the last few years has been the MusicBrainz database integration, but even that hasn't gotten their functionality back to where they were before they broke up with Gracenote. They need to focus more on the platform itself and a whole lot less on undesired add-ons.
  • your time and attention for pennies likely on some useless shit you have no interest in.

    I have a lifetime PLEX membership from a Black Friday sale some years ago. I was mostly interested in support a project that I had already been using for free for awhile. It offers me exactly nothing over the free version, especially after dropping their shared library cloud shit because OMG PIRATES!! (they know full well their business only exists because of shared media). Their official support is also an absolute j

    • Just like with websites, I am under no obligation to have my computer execute that ad displaying/playback code.

      Unless they plan on having you pay money, on *top* of the ads. Which would be a suicidal plan.

  • ... it will be glorious. Because obviousy we will use ad blockers.

    And no, in-stream ads won't help either. StreamRipper solved that problem, a decade and a half ago.

    I guess I'd write an mldonkey module for it, if mldonkey was still a fully alive and modern project. So that Plex service would basically be a fast file sharing network. :))

  • Plex has always been a great platform for serving local content that the user owns. I've been very happy over the years as they added features to help me curate my own library, like filters, auto-tagging, and metadata downloads. Then it seemed like Plex saw the future and it was streaming, so they glommed onto Tidal for music and now they offer video streaming. I suppose that may bring in more people that are only looking for streaming, but I hope it's not at the expense of the excellent platform they have
  • I've been using Kodi since it was XBMC many years ago, and I was using MythTV before that, which has some overlapping functions, but became useless to me when cable became all-encrypted-all-proprietary and it wasn't worth having a tuner card.

    To me Plex doesn't seem to offer anything I can't do with Kodi but requires me to setup an account and be managed by an outside company. I have considered setting up a Plex account since my TV can run a Plex client, which I figured might interface with my Kodi system b

  • I can't see how this will do anything to those who just want a nice interface from which to stream the movies their own to their own devices on their own local network. It's bad enough that they recently changed the landing page to market a bunch of stuff that you DON'T own. This means they'll be pushing that stuff more.

  • May I say I'd much prefer for the software to not suck...

  • ... today with a burner email. I'm 2 hours into "The Right Stuff." I don't know what Premium offers and I don't care.

    No credit card or stuff. I don't work for plex and don't give a shit if they sink or swim.

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