Image: Plex
Watching Plex videos with friends is about to get harder, with the company announcing that it will drop its “Watch Together” feature from its redesigned suite of mobile and TV apps.
On its community forum, a Plex rep announced Tuesday that “Watch Together will not be available in the new Plex experience for most devices.”
That said, Watch Together will live on in the Plex web app “for the foreseeable future,” the rep continued, adding that “we don’t preclude the possibility of offering similar functionality again in the future, using new tooling.”
The Watch Together feature has fallen by the wayside amid Plex’s push to roll out top-to-bottom revamps of its mobile and TV apps, including those for iOS, Android, and Apple TV.
“We’ve spent two years requiring our apps from the ground up to boost our development speed, which should enable us to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms,” the Plex rep explained. “However, this release also means ending support for some features that we’ve grown to love, like Watch Together.”
Plex’s Watch Together feature first rolled out in May 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The feature allows Plex users to watch movies and TV shows together with far-flung friends and relatives, including titles from Plex’s library of streaming videos as well as those on personal Plex media servers.
Watch-party functionality became a popular streaming feature during Covid, with Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, Movies Anywhere, and other streaming services launching their own versions during that pandemic.
But as Covid eased, some services began quietly dropping the feature, with Apple’s SharePlay “co-watching” functionality (which launched in 2021) taking up much of the slack.
SharePlay doesn’t support Plex, however, meaning that Plex users looking to party up must do so in web browsers after the new Plex apps arrive.
Author: Ben Patterson, Senior Writer, TechHive
Ben has been writing about technology and consumer electronics for more than 20 years. A PCWorld contributor since 2014, Ben joined TechHive in 2019, where he has covered everything from smart speakers and soundbars to smart lights and security cameras. Ben’s articles have also appeared in PC Magazine, TIME, Wired, CNET, Men’s Fitness, Mobile Magazine, and more. Ben holds a master’s degree in English literature.
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