The free streaming service Plex is making a major addition in 2023. The service has announced that its long-awaited transactional video-on-demand platform for movie and TV show rentals will be released sometime during or before the second quarter of 2023, according to Tech Crunch.
Plex first announced its plan to add a movie rental service at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2020, then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and those plans hit the skids. When asked what caused such a massive delay, Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski offered a frank reply.
“It was a lot harder than we thought,” Olechowski said. “Getting all the DRM [digital rights managment] stuff working everywhere — we switched DRM providers. And we had to get approval from all the studios.”
Plex also had to deal with a massive technical glitch before it could bring its rental service to market. The issue was causing streams of movies and shows on Android devices to simply shut down when they reached ad breaks. The problem took months to fix and absorbed essentially all of Plex’s engineering resources in the process. The company was forced to combat a data breach in August, though it’s unclear if this had any effect on the release of its movie rental platform.
Plex has also been splitting its focus in the last year between getting its rental service up and running and expanding its offerings of free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels. Plex doubled its FAST channel offerings in the past year to over 300, including new music channels, and its monthly active users have grown to over 16 million.
Plex is an incredibly flexible platform that’s perfect for fans of any media. It offers free, on-demand access to 50,000+ movies and TV shows, and hundreds of live TV channels as well. Plex offers a subscription tier for $4.99 per month that offers even more features for people who want more functionality, but it packs a powerful punch even in its free version.
Users can connect Plex to their computers to stream and share any media they have on their hard drives. The service even offers a Plex Arcade option where you can play dozens of Atari classics, plus your own collection of game ROMs and emulators on your favorite devices. On top of all these services, Plex will soon offer users the chance to rent hit movies and shows on its platform as well.
Plex
Plex is a free streaming service that includes on-demand access to 50,000+ movies and TV shows. The service also offers 1,100+ free-to-stream live TV channels in 193 countries. Users can also connect Plex to their computers to stream and share any media they have on their hard drives.