Streaming Media East '15: Plex Announces Its First TiVo App
The highly successful media organization and streaming service Plex announced its first app for TiVo users today at the Streaming Media East conference in New York City. The announcement came during the keynote address given by Scott Olechowski, Plex's co-founder and chief product officer. The app will be available in early June.
While Plex is available on a wide variety of platforms, including set-top boxes, mobile devices, game consoles, and personal NAS devices, TiVo was a notable hole in its distribution. With that hole plugged, Olechowski said that the company will focus on bringing feature parity to its slate of apps.
"The convenience and control is what people really enjoy," Olechowski said, adding that people want the ability to stream anything in their library to wherever they are without having to worry about synching.
Olechowski explained that Plex started several years back when he discovered that his young children wanted to watch the same movies and shows over and over again. Looking around for an easy streaming solution, he decided to create his own. He wanted his creation to be fun and simple and beautiful—storage technology adapted for the home user.
After a few years, Plex became a profitable business, now with around 45 employees around the world. It's one of the top 10 apps on many platforms, such as Roku where it has 1.5 million active installs. Plex counts 5 million registered households around the world, and is growing by 300,000 users each month. All of this growth was accomplished with almost no advertising.
"This personal media is really important to people," Olechowski said. "They will go out of their way to figure out a good solution."
Plex's core features are free to use, but the company also offers a paid tier called the Plex Pass. With a subscription members get Gracenote audio fingerprinting to clean up poorly tagged music libraries, Vevo music video streaming, the ability to sync mobile devices, parental controls, and more.
When Plex launched, Olechowski said, he was concerned it was too niche. But with the constant increase in downloaded media—the average household will have over 3.3TB of data by 2016, he noted—the problem of access is anything but niche. Now that the company's TiVo app is on the way, he and his developers are free to focus on improvements.
"We're always trying to optimize the experience for the situation," Olechowski said.
Watch the keynote video below and download the presentation.
Scott Olechowski, co-founder and chief product officer of Plex
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