Plex Is Finally Rolling Out a Video Rental Marketplace

Video streamer Plex introduced it’s bringing its rental service to shoppers after a three-year delay stemming from the covid-19 pandemic.

The growth will enable shoppers to discover films or TV exhibits to hire or buy on its market, offering simpler entry to discover a plethora of media content material. Plex intends to roll out its transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) retailer which can present rental choices by the second quarter of this 12 months.

The build-your-own streaming service hub initially revealed the growth of its free service on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2020 however encountered unexpected technical difficulties, which means it needed to reassess its plans for launch.

Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski informed TechCrunch that creating the TVOD retailer was harder than anticipated.

He defined a number of issues together with “getting all the DRM stuff working everywhere” saying Plex needed to change DRM suppliers. The firm additionally “had to get approval from all the studios,” he informed the outlet, including they repositioned themselves away from a third-party companion Plex had been working with to help its ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) service.

The information comes a 12 months after Plex was hit with technical issues when working with Nvidia’s up to date Shield 9.0 (Android 11) replace, inflicting Plex’s app to interrupt and shoppers to report points with constant streaming, saying the content material would freeze throughout advert breaks.

At the time, Nvidia positioned the partial blame on Plex, saying the app pushed a brand new replace that brought about an API change, successfully breaking Nvidia’s replace, one thing Plex now refers to as Androidgeddon, in response to TechCrunch. The disruption took a number of months to repair and reportedly utilized all of Plex’s engineering sources.

The upcoming 12 months will show to be extra profitable, “with some huge new features coming soon,” CEO Keith Valory stated in a year-in-review blog post. He added that the corporate is “super excited to share” the developments with the shoppers.