Apple, meanwhile, has been steadily adding more sources to its “TV” app on iOS and Apple TV after launching it in 2017. Amazon likewise recently released a major update to its Fire TV software with a bigger emphasis on live TV and personalized recommendations. Last year, for instance, Google overhauled its Android TV platform around a unified TV guide, which it calls Google TV. “We’ve done a lot of the foundational work behind the scenes, and now we’re ready to start a whole bunch of rollouts over the next 6 to 12 months, of a whole bunch of new, pretty big, more mainstream capabilities,” says Scott Olechowski, Plex’s chief product officer and cofounder. It also had to build an ad business around all those free movies and shows. It needed to rebuild its apps in a way that could accommodate new sources of content without too much effort, and it needed to start building relationships with major content providers in New York and Hollywood. Still, Plex has always insisted that its mission would take many years to complete, and much of its work so far has been about laying the groundwork. Yet in a world with so many major services streaming so much video, Plex’s current offerings only account for a smidgen of what people might want to watch. The service started adding free movies and shows in late 2019, followed by live streaming channels in mid-2020. But so far its progress has come in bits and pieces. The company’s been talking about it for over four years now, including in a Fast Company profile I wrote in 2017. Plex’s goal of aggregating all the world’s video content isn’t new. “What we’re doing-and it’s an audacious mission for sure-is building one beautiful app that allows people to get all the content they care about,” Valory says. CEO Keith Valory says the money will help Plex grow its team, increase its marketing efforts, and pursue new content, and it expects to make some major new product announcements later this year. The $50 million round includes $15 million in new capital, with the rest being used for employees and early shareholders who want to sell back some of their equity. To that end, the company is raising more money in a funding round led by Toronto-based Intercap. Instead of making you bounce between a dozen or more different apps to find what you want, Plex thinks it can make sense of the mess through a combination of subscriptions, rentals, free videos, and deep links into other apps-all delivered through a single menu.
Lately, however, it’s been chasing a broader mission to bring all the world’s media into one app. The 13-year-old company may still be best-known for its media server software, beloved by people who want to maintain their own entertainment collections on their own hard drives.
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