Plex started off as a self-hosted media streaming solution, allowing people to create their own servers with movies, TV shows, and music and share access with others. The service has expanded over the past few years to include ad-supported movies and TV from Plex itself, and now Plex will organize media from other services alongside your own content.

Plex said in a blog post, "we’re proud to be launching an entirely new section of Plex, focused on discovering, searching, and personalizing movies and TV shows across virtually any streaming service—whether it’s Plex’s own free movies and TV, or your other subscriptions like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and as many of the various personal media libraries you have access to. As of today, Plex searches, personalizes, and organizes all of your content, no matter where that content lives."

Select your services

This is similar to the search function of Google TV (previously known as Google Play Movies & TV), which can tell you which streaming services have whatever movie or show you're searching for. However, Plex's search function also includes results from connected Plex libraries and Plex's own catalog of ad-supported content. Plex claims this doesn't require sending an index of your self-hosted content to any servers, saying, "personal servers are not sending lists of library content to Plex. We don’t know what’s on your server."

Plex is also building on this functionality with a universal watchlist feature, which allows you to search for future movies and add them to a watchlist. You'll then be notified when the movie is in theaters, available to rent, or added to any of your streaming services.

Plex search results

The new functionality is available in the latest versions of all Plex applications, including the TV, desktop, and mobile apps. Plex servers have to be using the default Plex Movie Agent and Plex TV Series Agent for self-hosted content to appear in the new combined search.

Source: Plex, Plex Support

Via: 9to5Google