Plex gets ready to rhumble
MEDIA STREAMING stalwart Plex has signed a deal with Warner Brothers, which will see classic titles made available to users, at no charge.
Plex has traditionally been more focused on giving users a way of collecting their personal collections of videos, photos and music from multiple hard drives, NAS devices and PCs.
But with the streaming wars expected to go completely bonkers in 2020, its clear that Plex has a strategy. Last year, it introduced integration with Tidal for music streaming, and thanks to its deal with WB, it has a streaming video service of its very own too.
The company is already well aware of the landscape before it, and will start offering more paid subscription services next year, in the hope of creating a “one-stop-streaming shop”. Plex has no plans to launch a formal streaming service of its own, but it certainly has reasons to encourage the pivot.
That’s because one of the biggest criticisms of the platform has been the fact that many of its customers will be watching torrented, pirated or ripped files which technically gives Plex the connotation on being illegal. It’s the same issue which BitTorrent (the company) found itself facing when it decided to promote legitimate products using the tech.
Plex wants to be squeaky clean (and, we can’t emphasise enough, isn’t doing anything illegal – it’s you lot) and getting some big-name streaming services into its channel library (BBC iPlayer has been available for years) might be the lure that people have been waiting on, especially if they can subscribe right from the Plex app.
The issue could be whether (say) Disney+ wants to be seen on Plex – its all very chicken and egg. We won’t really know the outcomes of all this until more of these proposed services come online. We’re expecting carnage. µ