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.
Make up your mind. (Score:1)
Choose one.
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Choose one.
I think they're going with the Crackle and TubiTV model, not the Hulu model.
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Dealing with corporate influence in Congress would solve this any many other problems.
Influence? (Score:2)
Show me a no-corporate-lobbyist politician, and I'll show you somebody who hides it well.
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Bernie Sanders.
Sane copyright is an oxymoron. (Score:2)
Either you have a law on giving thieves, err, distributors an artificial scarcity monopoly to the works of victims, err, creators ... on something, whose distribution is physically impossible to even control*,
OR you sanely agree that artificial scarcity and monopolies are crimes, even if what you planned on would not be physically impossible.
A legitimate business is one where the exchanged things are of equal value.
Like the exchanged money and actual work.
If you only give me a copy of the result of your wor
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It’s probably why they got the rights to stream to so many countries, it is mostly forgotten back catalog that probably isn’t worth even pressing DVDs for. Under a sane copyright system this is the kind of stuff that would fall into the public domain.
Yes, it should be in the public domain.
Seven years plus an optional seven year renewal if the author was still alive and wanted it, was good enough for the founding fathers. It's good enough for me.
Now we just need functionality (Score:1)
Teen Wolf? Sign me up!!! (Score:2)
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It was joke. (Score:2)
We'd rather watch /dev/zero.
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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).
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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.
Quite a Fork. (Score:2)
Plex sure has drive into left field since being an OS X fork of XBMC.
Because profit/greed. (Score:2)
Because people believe, profit is a valid goal. Instead of improving or advancing humanity or something else that you'd actually need and use that money for.
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Remember when Plex was just a free service that let you stream media to your devices?
It still is. I've been using Plex (along with PlexConnect) to stream the content I own to my antiquated Apple TV 3rd gen for a few years now.
Just use it without a Plex account.
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So many geographies is a plus (Score:3)
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.
This is how the eternal struggle for "growth" ends (Score:2)
Well, growth by definition must always end. (Score:2)
In an environment of limited resources.
And exponential growth ends basically ASAP.
In nature, that is called an explosion.
What in nature is called stable and surviving, is what we call "stagnation. basically depression". Silly.
Ad supported != Free. That means you're selling (Score:2)
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
Sure it means free! (Score:2)
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.
Once everybody switched to ad models ... (Score:2)
... 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. :))
Can anything be best at streaming and local? (Score:1)
I can't bring myself to Plex. (Score:2)
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
Soon to ruin local streaming... (Score:2)
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.
As a paying customer (Score:2)
May I say I'd much prefer for the software to not suck...
Being per(plex)ed, I signed up ... (Score:2)
... 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.
Re:Being per(plex)ed, I signed up ... AND ... (Score:2)
... I'm running ad-blockers out the wazoo in Firefox and plex doesn't block me. I'm surprised by that. The site is ad-supported and I'm not seeing any.