Plex Discover Together is a built-in social media service

Plex has always been one of the best ways to access the media you want from wherever you are. Not only does it aggregate info from the most popular streaming services, but it also lets you rate content, view trailers, add items to a watchlist, and access content on servers owned by your friends.

However, up until now, Plex has been a very insular service. Aside from the Watch Together feature, there hasn’t been a simple way to get social with it. Well, the new Plex Discover Together feature just dropped in stable form, and it’s a game-changer for Plex fans.

Essentially, Discover Together is a suite of tools that brings Plex features into the social sphere. Now, all your Plex apps — on your TV, on your phone, and your computer — are social media apps. You can find friends, see what they’re watching or want to watch, post comments, and hunt down new things to watch based not on an algorithm but on what people you know are watching.

Let’s break down how Plex Discover Together works.

There are three main aspects of Discover Together. Here’s what they all do:

• Profile: This is found by heading to Discover and tapping the My Profile tab. This is just like any other social media profile you own. There’s an avatar, a bio, location information, and more. Your stats are also here, such as how many films/shows you’ve watched since Plex started tracking that info, what you’ve watched recently, what you’ve rated recently, and more. You can easily control who can see this information through Plex’s settings.
• People: To see this, head to the Discover section of your Plex app and click on the new People tab. Here, you’ll see your friends list, suggestions for people you might know, and a search bar for finding people. You can click through to see any of those folks’ own profiles. Don’t worry: you can control who can see your data anytime, and you will be private by default until you complete the onboarding process.
• Activity: This is where everything comes together. Like the Facebook Wall of yore, this is a running aggregate of all the things your friends are watching, rating, or adding to their watchlist. It’s a way of quickly seeing what people you know are checking out. Like any proper social media network, you can comment on activities. For example, you could see a notification that a friend checked out a new series, and you could post a comment underneath that activity asking them if they liked it.

Some of this information also makes its way to content listings themselves. For example, if a friend watches a movie and you visit that movie’s page, you’ll see a new section called Friends History. You’ll be able to quickly see that your friend watched that movie and can even click through to see if they rated it. Note that it doesn’t matter where the friend watched the movie. If they watched it on Netflix, but you don’t have a Netflix subscription, you’ll still be able to see this activity and rating (assuming the friend did those actions through Plex).

All features of this new social media service inside Plex are rolling out today to everyone. You do not need to be a Plex Pass subscriber, as all features are 100% free. You also don’t need to run a private server or be connected to a friend’s server since all features work on any Plex content, including premium, free, and VOD streaming services.

Also, note that TV apps like the ones on Rokus, Apple TV streamers, Fire TV sticks, etc., will not be able to create text-based comments. This is obviously because of the lack of universal keyboard input on those systems. You will still be able to read comments, though. The only exception is Roku and Apple TV hardware, which will not immediately be able to read comments on activities. Plex told us this will roll out at some point this month.