Watching Plex movies with mates is about to get tougher, with the corporate saying that it’ll drop its “Watch Collectively” characteristic from its redesigned suite of cellular and TV apps.
On its neighborhood discussion board, a Plex rep introduced Tuesday that “Watch Collectively won’t be out there within the new Plex expertise for many gadgets.”
That stated, Watch Collectively will dwell on within the Plex internet app “for the foreseeable future,” the rep continued, including that “we don’t preclude the potential of providing comparable performance once more sooner or later, utilizing new tooling.”
The Watch Collectively characteristic has fallen by the wayside amid Plex’s push to roll out top-to-bottom revamps of its cellular and TV apps, together with these for iOS, Android, and Apple TV.
“We’ve spent two years requiring our apps from the bottom as much as increase our growth pace, which ought to allow us to deliver new options to you extra effectively, throughout extra platforms,” the Plex rep defined. “Nonetheless, this launch additionally means ending help for some options that we’ve grown to like, like Watch Collectively.”
Plex’s Watch Collectively characteristic first rolled out in Could 2020, in the course of the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The characteristic permits Plex customers to observe films and TV exhibits along with far-flung mates and kin, together with titles from Plex’s library of streaming movies in addition to these on private Plex media servers.
Watch-party performance grew to become a preferred streaming characteristic throughout Covid, with Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, Motion pictures Wherever, and different streaming providers launching their very own variations throughout that pandemic.
However as Covid eased, some providers started quietly dropping the characteristic, with Apple’s SharePlay “co-watching” performance (which launched in 2021) taking on a lot of the slack.
SharePlay doesn’t help Plex, nonetheless, which means that Plex customers trying to get together up should achieve this in internet browsers after the brand new Plex apps arrive.
