Plex, the media center largely known as a hub for TV and movies that you and your friends obtained one way or another, now lets you pay for movie rentals. It’s both a convenient way to watch movies without having to hunt across multiple services, and yet another shift by Plex to be closer to the mainstream.
Plex’s first set of available films is more than 1,000 titles, with some notable recent-run offerings: Barbie, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Wonka, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, and so forth. As is typical of digital rentals, you have 30 days to start watching a movie and then 48 hours to finish it.
Prices at the moment range from $3.99 to $5.99. Conveniently, movies you rent on one platform can be played on any other. Even on Apple devices, or, as Plex puts it, “devices that don’t allow direct rentals on their platform.” Rentals are only available in the US, however.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Develop an audience of paying movie renters on a platform not exactly known for paid media.
Credit:
Plex
Interestingly, Plex doesn’t offer movie purchases, and there is a reason why. Plex CEO Keith Valory told TechCrunch that a purchase option “creates some additional wrinkles—now you’ve got to keep this locker for people long-term and does that really make sense [for us]?” It’s true that platforms brokering purchases between users and media conglomerates can find themselves in awkward spots, like Sony almost having deleted all Discovery content bought by PlayStation users. That kind of scenario is also, of course, the kind of thing that initially made Plex appealing to people with their own content to store.
