Streamer Plex finally ready to launch a TV and movie rental marketplace businessroundups.org

Media streamer Plex promised years ago to expand its free streaming service to include rentals, but that announcement came just before the pandemic — at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2020. The company also faced a host of other issues at the time, including technical glitches, causing the company had to re-prioritize its plans. Now, Plex says it’s finally approaching the launch of a marketplace where consumers can find movies and TV shows to rent or buy, making Plex even more of a one-stop shop for all your media content.

The company said it expects to launch its TVOD (transactional video-on-demand, or rental) store by the second quarter of this year, if not sooner.

When asked what the delay was, Plex admitted that the project was more challenging than initially anticipated.

“It was much harder than we thought,” says Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski. “Making all the DRM stuff work everywhere — we switched DRM providers. And we had to get approval from all studios,” he explained. Plex also decided to move away from another third-party partner it had worked with to power its ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) service — a hurdle the company said needed to be cleared before launching its rental marketplace .

And then the company was hit by something they’ve now dubbed “Androidgeddon” internally. This was essentially an all-hands-on-deck nightmare tech snafu that caused streams to randomly stop at commercial breaks on Android TV, Android mobile, and Amazon Fire TV platforms. The problem was eventually traced to a change in an SDK (software development kit) from Google, but it took several months to fix, using every technical resource in the process.

In addition to this combination of factors delaying the launch of its rental marketplace, Plex chose to focus on another popular product over the past year: the FAST channels, or free ad-supported streaming TV. FAST channels are basically anything that resembles the same kind of TV guide that a cable provider offers, similar to something like Pluto TV or Xumo. (Roku and Amazon also offer FAST channels through The Roku Channel’s Live TV guide and Amazon Freeveerespectively.) This is a growing part of the streaming market and serves as a way for advertisers to reach consumers as the number of cable TV viewers declines.

FAST channels have been a major growth area for Plex’s business, consumer engagement, and revenue. Company announced at CES this week, it doubled its FAST programming over the past year to reach more than 300 channels, including A+E’s Crime 360, Hallmark Movies & More, and The Walking Dead on Stories by AMC. In addition, the user base grew to 16 million monthly active users who have streamed billions of minutes of content, including through FAST programming and ad-supported content, nearly tripling Plex’s annual ad revenue. However, ad-supported video is still faster than FAST, in terms of ad revenue, but both are growing.

While Plex doesn’t disclose its earnings, it runs in the double digits. The company now has 175 employees and, unlike many in the technology industry, has not had to resort to layoffs.

Moreover, the tightening of advertising budgets has not yet harmed the business.

“It’s been healthy,” Olechowski noted. “We haven’t seen a big shift in the programmatic market from year to year that has affected us… we’re pretty happy with where we are,” he said.

Video rentals aren’t the only thing on Plex’s roadmap this year. The company still hopes to launch a subscription offering – another idea it’s been toying with for a while – that will allow users to subscribe to paid streamers through Plex. And it aims to introduce recommendations in the “Discover” section launched earlier this year, offering users a Universal Watchlist and the first social experiences – the latter of which will roll out to all Plex users later this year, well, instead of just Plex Pass premium subscribers.

The company says it wants to introduce a way for users to leave reviews of the shows and movies they’ve watched instead of just leaving a star rating, but the timing for that feature isn’t quite as set. All these changes also include some UX updates (user experience design changes).