Plex: The World's Most Comprehensive Entertainment Platform

Anyone who subscribes to an assortment of streaming services or has an extensive personal media library knows the pain of keeping everything organized. It’s challenging to keep track of movies and TV shows you want to watch. With various streaming apps and different catalogs, you might yearn for the days of a single cable subscription.

It doesn’t have to be as stressful as it may seem at first glance, though, with streaming platforms like Plex playing a huge role in simplifying and streamlining the whole process. Apart from being one of the best media server platforms, Plex has grown to offer its own impressive library of free movies and TV shows, live channels, and Internet-wide search and watchlist capabilities to enhance your media experience. Here’s a look at everything the service offers and why you should be using Plex!

Who is Plex for?

The short answer: everybody. Whether you are an avid TV and movie watcher who wants to discover content across streaming platforms quickly, simply want to expertly organize your personal media, or are an audiophile looking to enhance your music streaming experience, there’s something for everyone.

The Entertainment Fanatic

If this is you, you watch stuff all over the streaming universe, probably paying for a bunch of streaming apps and never remembering where your movies and shows live.

After launching its free, ad-supported streaming service in 2019, Plex has since grown to become a global streaming platform with access to a diverse catalog of more than 50,000 titles, movies, and TV shows, along with more than 600 live channels in the US and hundreds worldwide. The best part? Plex doesn’t require a premium subscription to enjoy your free streaming content and locally stored media. You can access this all for free.

But beyond offering access to its own extensive catalog of entertainment content, Plex makes it easy to find new content across any streaming platform. Plex’s Discover feature lets you find movies and TV shows on other services like Disney Plus, Max, Netflix, and Prime Video and maintain a single watchlist that covers everything.

Plex will also showcase the latest trending movies and shows from your services on the homepage so you don’t miss out and dynamically tracks selected content if it moves from one service to another, so you never have to guess where something is streaming. Plex also deep-links to all your streaming services – Instead of coming home and doing that nightly app dance, just open Plex, and you can launch all of your content conveniently from one place.

And if you’re worried about any limitations on where you can watch media, don’t be. With Plex, you can stream content on all your devices, from Android and iOS smartphones and tablets to Windows and Mac laptops and PCs, smart TVs, and gaming consoles.

With Plex, there’s no more worrying about streaming restrictions based on your location. Anyone who’s fired up Netflix while on vacation or after moving to another country will know the pain of realizing that the TV shows they’ve been watching aren’t available anymore because of regional restrictions. Unlike other free streaming services, Plex has the most free streaming content available worldwide.

The (personal) Media Mogul

This person has a massive movie collection and created an entire personal home library. Their problem? Organization. A mess of files and folders just don’t cut it for their amazing entertainment.

Plex is one of the best ways to organize, maintain, and access your personal library across a slew of devices, giving you a streaming app-like feel, down to cover art, posters, and trailers. You can then watch content stored on your Plex media server on any device. Plex lets you track what you’ve watched, what’s in progress, and what is still pending, and easily track any new content added to your server. In short, Plex is a media organizer’s dream!

The Music Aficionado

The music aficionado still plays their CDs and vinyl because those music streamers have ‘sub-par’ bitrates and ‘overly compressed’ vocals. Plex has a solution for this, delivering high-quality playback anywhere you want to listen.

With Plex’s Plexamp app, you can control and organize your own music collection and add TIDAL music streaming to the mix. The fan-favorite Plexamp app features unlimited streaming of your music library on the go across all of your devices and platforms. Plexamp uses high-quality audio formats and supports lossless audio. You also get features like true gapless playback, loudness leveling, and smooth transitions between tracks to provide an excellent listening experience.

The app also has a variety of preset “radio stations,” like Library Radio, that pull music from a user’s library and help them rediscover their favorite tracks. You can create curated radio playlists to match your mood or take advantage of preset options like Decade Radio, which focuses on particular decades, and Time Travel Radio which lets you easily find old but not forgotten favorites.

What is Plex Pass?

While you don’t need a paid subscription to enjoy Plex’s free streaming content, search and watchlist features, media server capabilities, or Plexamp, they offer a subscription tier called Plex Pass to take your entertainment experiences to the next level.

For the entertainment fanatic, you can save time while watching movies and TV shows with the option to skip credits and go directly to end-credit scenes, if any, and skip TV show intros, which is a huge positive since the time can certainly add up while binge-watching your favorite content.

You will get access to useful extras like trailers, cast interviews, behind-the-scenes featurettes, deleted scenes, and more. TV show lovers will also enjoy Plex Pass’ DVR-like feature that will let you record live broadcast TV, including sports, directly on your device, as long as you have a supported TV antenna and tuner connected to your media server.

For the (personal) media mogul, Plex Pass adds several features that regular Plex users will appreciate, including early access to new Plex features and beta releases of the Media Server and other apps. You’ll get a detailed view of your server’s configuration settings, playback metrics, user stats, and further details with Plex Dash.

A subscription will also open up advanced features like the ability to set sharing restrictions, give other users access to select premium features, and the option to set a maximum upload bandwidth and per-stream caps. There’s also the hardware transcoding feature that enhances your streaming experience by using your device’s video decoder and encoder hardware to convert videos and stream high-resolution content better and to more devices simultaneously.

And for the music aficionado, Plex Pass gets you enhanced features with Plexamp, like loudness leveling, the AI-powered Sonic Sage feature, timed lyrics for a fun karaoke experience, and offline access to all your music when on the go. With Plex Pass, you’ll also get a discount on your HiFi or HiFi Plus TIDAL subscription.

Plex’s Pro Week is the best time to get a Plex Pass subscription

Plex Pass is regularly priced at an affordable $4.99 per month, with an impressive discount available with the annual subscription that brings the price to $39.99 a year. Users who plan to stick with Plex for longer can make use of the lifetime subscription priced at just $119.99.

If you were waiting to pick up a Plex Pass subscription, Plex’s Pro Week is a great time to do so. From Monday September 18 to Monday, September 25 at 11:59pm PT / Tuesday 6:59am UTC, Plex is offering a 20% discount on the lifetime subscription, bringing all its advanced features to less than a hundred dollars!