According to recent reports, last year’s purchase of Watchup by media moguls at Plex may signal ambitions well beyond the relatively simple addition of news to the company’s available services. In fact, if the reports turn out to be accurate, the company plans to effectively reimagine itself as a central hub and delivery platform for media of various types from across the industry as a whole. That, of course, would include the exclusive media typically only found on any given platform such as Netflix or Youtube, with all of the content being published to Plex behind a single interface and library, alongside all of the media users already access through the company’s offering. The complexity involved in accomplishing that goal would be immense from both a technological and licensing standpoint, as well as a financial one. There will also be challenges in working out exactly how to deliver that kind of platform in a more practical sense.
With that said, the company is in the position it needs to be in order to get started; it is already a well-known way for people to upload and access their own content, whether personal libraries of movies and TV shows or general footage. More recently the acquisition of Watchup potentially landed Plex a robust recommendations system and Watchup’s extensive industry connections. If the reports turn out to be accurate, Plex plans to put those to work first by bringing podcasts from platforms like YouTube into its fold and making recommendations based on what a user already watches. Again, the goal here wouldn’t be to take that content from other platforms but to expand the reach and influence of content creators and curators that already exist on those platforms and to position itself as a central hub for media. It would effectively be an effort to start solving the customer experience problem resulting from users needing to navigate so many platforms to find their favorite content. As with Plex’s current services, that solution would be available on the web, via a mobile app, and possibly through a TV antenna-enabled streaming box which the company is rumored to be working on.
Beyond that, the company’s plan is to be able to deliver all of that, whether “that” is media stored on a user’s DVR, uploaded to the service by the user, live television, or content from major streaming service providers. Furthermore, it plans to accomplish it within three to four years, TechCrunch claims.