22 days into 2025. Miles to go before we sleep. It’s all hands on deck, and all eyes on our mission (and the official release date of The Last of Us season 2).
We are as relentless as Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth. We are as obsessed as Jessica Gunning’s Martha. We are as devout as Ralph Fiennes’s Cardinal Thomas Lawrence.
Why? Because there’s no place like Plex.
We aren’t just building a streaming app. We’re building a global community. We aren’t just an aggregator. We’re giving fans every way possible to discover and stream the entertainment that matters to them most.
And less than 30 days into this new year, we’ve created even more. There’s something for everyone—and a little something extra for our Plex pros, but we’re gonna make you read all the way to the end for that one.
Kermode. Dargis. Puig. Chang. Morris. Siskel. Ebert. Their Two Thumbs. And Now, You.
These voices have made an impact on entertainment fans across the globe, and now yours can too. Because today, you can write reviews that are visible to every fan on Plex. Love it? Tell the world. Hate it? Tell the world. But if you think you’re gonna be cool and write the world’s shortest review, Leonard Maltin already beat you to it. With his review of the 1948 film Isn’t It Romantic, he merely stated, “No.” On Plex, the more verbose, the better. Tell the world how you really feel.
But this isn’t just about feeling the warm glow of the spotlight. It’s about firing up some conversation too. Now you can comment on reviews posted from other fans, and chat about the movies and shows you love (or didn’t).
To us, discovery isn’t just about finding what to watch, but also about finding more friends and fans like you in the process. For that reason you can now access your Plex profile on watch.plex.tv, and make it visible to ANYONE! By default all Plex users are findable by other Plex users in the app via search (unless you’ve already changed this setting). By making your profile publicly accessible on watch.plex.tv you can easily share a link to your profile with others so that they can see what you’ve been watching, what’s on your Watchlist, and more! Who knows, maybe you’ll find the next Statler to your Waldorf.
For the silent critics out there, worry not. Your current privacy settings have not changed.
But if you’re ready to make your Ratings & Reviews visible to everyone on Plex, simply choose one of the two new options available under privacy settings before writing your next review.
Your privacy settings apply to ALL of your Ratings & Reviews. These options are also now available for other profile privacy settings like Watchlist, Watch History, and your Friends list.
The New Plex Experience Is Coming, but First We Preview
We’re thrilled to expand the preview of our newly reimagined Plex experience to include testing on Apple TV, with more platforms coming soon. Please keep in mind this is nowhere close to perfect, but we want to get feedback from the community as early as we can. The app will get better over time!
Here’s some of the stuff you’re going to see and love:
Head over to the forums for instructions on how to download the preview app for testing, and explore the new experience.
This one’s for the pros.
Let’s climb into our time machine and rewind it back to Pro Week 2024 where we announced the release of HEVC hardware encoding as a forum preview. Now let’s stay buckled in and return to today where we announce that we’ve moved this feature out of preview, and into the hands of Plex Pass holders everywhere. That was a quick-ish trip!
Here’s why it’s a big deal.
HEVC encoding offers a better visual quality at the same bit rate, allowing for a higher-quality video over the same (or lower!) bandwidth usage for streaming from your Plex Media Server. Additionally, this encoding has the ability to preserve HDR metadata, which means no tone mapping is required!
Cliff notes: Save your bandwidth, ditch the tone mapping!
Still here?!
You’ve made it this far, which means you like us, you really like us. We’ve got more coming down the pipe, but for now, go write some reviews!