Plex wants to sweeten its huge price hike with social features

Since Plex is about to ask new Lifetime Pass buyers for an eye-watering $749.99, you’d at least hope the service has a few new tricks up its sleeve. The new social features it just announced probably won’t make that price look reasonable, but they do at least suggest Plex is investing some of the massive extra revenue it’s hoping to bring in.

As reported by TechCrunch, Plex is rolling out a batch of social and discovery features aimed at making the platform more of a place to discuss and discover new movies and TV shows. The new tools include Discussions, Lists, Match Score, and Alerts.

Discussions is the most obviously social part of the update. It’s a community forum-style feature that lets users comment on movies and TV shows directly within Plex. It might be that Plex is trying to keep some of the Reddit-style chatter inside its own walls, though whether the company can keep those conversations from turning into the usual internet swamp remains to be seen. Plex told TechCrunch it will use a mix of AI and human moderation for written and visual content.

Lists is another new addition, and it does roughly what the name suggests. Users can create and share lists of movies and shows, plus react with emojis rather than just star ratings. Later this year, Plex plans to add the ability to import lists from other platforms, as well as react to and comment on friends’ lists.

If you’re not interested in any of that social stuff, the more practical-sounding feature is Match Score, which predicts how much you might enjoy a title based on your viewing habits and ratings. Plex co-founder and chief product officer Scott Olechowski told TechCrunch that the idea is to give users “a quick, personal read” on whether something is likely to be for them, rather than leaving them to scroll endlessly.

Finally, Plex is also adding Alerts that notify users about activity related to the lists, movies, shows, and film professionals they follow. Lists are available now, Discussions is set to launch this month, and the other features will roll out later this year.

There does seem to be a little something for everyone here, though we suspect that the vast majority of users planning to fork out an arm and a leg for the new lifetime subscription will be hoping there’s a lot more to come from the service.