UPDATE: We’d like to let you know that after April 15th, 2022, the Web Shows section will no longer be available on Plex. However, the good news is that most of your favorite content (and more!) still lives on in other areas of the Plex app.
It will come as no surprise to any long-time reader of this humble publication that we here at Plex are pretty sweet on media. While you might think of us as being focused on media inside your home, we’ve always had an interest in media streaming from that fabulous assortment of cloudy pipes we call the Internet.
The first phase of this interest was Plex Plugins. Although fun to write, they never supported much of the rich library functionality we’ve added over the years, and they also required you to run a server. This notion of needing to run a server at home to access media from the Internet just doesn’t make a lot of sense, which is one of the reasons we’re retiring them.
The second phase came with Plex News and our recent launch of Plex Podcasts. We developed a powerful and flexible platform for delivering online media using an API nearly identical to the media server, which is awesome for a few reasons—it’s a small step (not a giant leap) for apps that are used to talking to Media Servers to support Podcasts and more, and we’ve achieved near-feature parity between online content libraries and their homebound kindred spirits. Podcasts and Plex are a great combination: an enormous trove of incredibly awesome content (OK, and some questionable content) mated with our rich media platform on just about any screen (or speaker) you’d care to use.
Today, we’re happy to announce the third phase of our master plan for galactic domination: Web Shows (in beta). In a nutshell, we’ve partnered with a number of media producers to bring you high-quality episodic video content inside Plex! We’ve seeded our catalog with lovely, curated shows from only the highest quality creators; no robotic “top ten life hacks” or sparkly slime spam, and we’re looking forward to growing our catalog with your help. We have the best shows from amazing publishers like Condé Nast, Bonnier Corp., Fandor, Future, TWiT, Jukin, and Studio 71, including shows from Saveur, GQ, Field and Stream, PC Gamer, and Engadget and many more to come.
We’ve always worked to bring you a beautiful, distraction-free experience for your media. Gorgeous interfaces for presenting media in the loveliest way, a marked lack of crazy comment threads, and abundant options for personalization. And now you can enjoy all that is Plex with a bunch of great new content.
Barkley recommends “The Pet Collective”. Woof!
