After its $40 million fundraising, streaming media firm Plex announced its movie rental storefront expansion. The addition, first available to U.S. consumers, will provide the streamer with another revenue stream beyond subscriptions and ad-supported streaming, which will be crucial as the ad market remains volatile.
Plex users can rent movies from WB, Paramount, MGM, Lionsgate, and A24 at launch, including “Barbie,” “Wonka,” “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning,” “The Color Purple,” “Expend4bles,” “PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie,” “Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” “Mean Girls,” and others.
Plex claims there will be over 1,000 $3.99 titles to rent, but the number will expand. As titles move in and out of windows, rents will also change.
The business touted a TV and movie rental marketplace for years, but other priorities took first. First designed before the COVID-19 epidemic, Plex, like many other firms, witnessed an influx of streaming clients and changed its emphasis. Other technological issues dragged things down.
Plex announced a rental marketplace at CES this year. The shop will initially only sell movies, not TV series. Because Plex’s user polls showed that rentals were more popular, it won’t sell movies.
“We’re looking at the purchase use case because that creates some additional wrinkles. Now you’ve got to keep this locker for people long-term, and does that really make sense [for us]?” said Plex CEO Keith Valory. User studies indicated that the majority would still watch TV on streaming services but would rather rent movies, which contributed to the absence of TV show rentals.
Users get 30 days to watch rented movies. Like other markets, you have 48 hours to finish reviewing the rental. Plex’s home screen’s “Continue Watching” area will show the movie if you don’t complete it. The business claims it will add more studio partners to its movie rental marketplace.
Plex believes its suggestion powers will set it apart from competing movie rental services. Modern Plex users manage their home media, stream live channels, watch ad-supported TV and movies, and find new programming across their services or through their friends’ watching patterns through newer social networking tools. Plex was in trouble lately when consumers disclosed their watching of things they shouldn’t have. Plex claims it made this sharing function more evident to consumers that they were opting in.
Plex claims its massive user data might boost movie rental sales. Your friend watching a new movie on your watchlist may motivate you to rent and watch it too.
“I think we’re well ahead of the market from a technology standpoint with our personalization and recommendations,” adds Valory. “We use machine learning and other heuristics to get that. This is one of the benefits of building our recommendation engine across all materials, he says.
Plex must also deal with becoming a studio partner when their software is used to store home material, including DVDs extracted years ago. The business says that’s not a problem since it works with studio partners to provide protection and watermarking to stop illicit usage and safeguard copyright if something is breached.
Plex says the new movie marketplace will launch on Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV/Google TV, Roku, smart TVs (LG, Hisense, Samsung, Sony, VIZIO), game consoles, and Apple and Android smartphones and tablets.
