Andrew O'Hara
Available now as a free update to the Plex app, users can stream more than 80 live TV channels for free.
The new ad-supported streaming option allows users to stream Toon Goggles, Tastemade, Fubo Sports Network, IGN, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, and more. Offerings will encompass sports, news, kids, cooking, lifestyle, and other genres appealing to all types of users. With this new streaming option, Plex is now capable of streaming live TV, one's own media library, over-the-air local live TV and DVR, on-demand titles and web shows, podcasts, curated news, and music via TIDAL, from a single app.
"Combining the new Live TV service with the over-the-air TV and DVR feature, Plex offers the most comprehensive and least expensive streaming TV service in the world," said Plex CEO Keith Valory.
It is now available for Apple TV, iOS devices, Roku, Amazon Fire, Android, and the web. Updates for smart TVs game consoles shortly.
The streaming wars continue to heat up with several new services continuing to launch, providing consumers with not only more options, but more monthly subscriptions as well. Quibi and Peacock have both launched in recent months. Plex at least keeps things affordable by only offering an ad-supported free option.
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2 Comments
I love Plex, I really do. But I just looked through those new live channels and they are almost uniformly awful. I couldn't find one channel I would watch on a regular basis. It's almost as if they struck a deal to agree to pick up the channels that are so bad even the cable companies rejected them.
Part of the reason is that it suffers by comparison. Plex already has the ad-supported (non-live) TV/Movies category which has an OK selection, and wonderful support for live TV/DVR of over-the-air antenna digital TV, and Web Shows (podcasts). Those are all better than this new live TV service.
And, in the time it took them to implement this (or, probably a HECK OF A LOT LESS), they could have actually implemented some useful features their user-base has been screaming at them for (in some cases for like 7 years!).
For example, the photo library doesn't let you select a group of images and 'download' them locally, oh I don't know, so you can actually USE them!
Or, one of my favorites, being their claim to fame was a video library... they you similarly can't just easily 'download' those videos/moves to your local device to take with you. You have to 'sync' them, which means they often get re-encoded/transcoded, which means if you pick a half-dozen movies for that upcoming trip, you'd better hope you did that a week in advance!