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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

I feel like Plex is late to the game with this given that all the new, up-to-date smart TV/streaming stick interfaces already have this feature - either they allow downloaded apps to register the movies they can stream, or there’s a central directory that surfaces apps that can stream certain content even when they’re not locally installed. See the TV app on iDevices or Google TV for an example.

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Anecdote of one, but personally I found the Apple TV app on my physical Apple TV (and yes I add my name to the long list of people asking how high they were when naming overlapping but not nearly identical hardware and software products the same as each other) to be so bad that I never use it.

I love the idea that it can pull all my media into one place, but realistically it doesn't work with all apps - a particularly relavent example in this thread being that it completely ignores my plex - and is buggy with the rest, such as BBC iPlayer which usually correctly shows up in Apple TV app (all be it with a worse UI than BBC's not-amazing-itself app) but doesn't always show my latest next-up info.

I dislike it so much that I have watched illegal rips of Apple TV+ shows on plex despite having a valid subscription to watch them in the Apple TV+ section of the Apple TV app on my Apple TV device.

I have my personally owned media on Plex so this is natural progression for me--to use it as a hub.

I have been using Roku TVs for years and if they have this feature I'm not aware of it. I also have various TV's around the house that have different OSes and apps...Plex can simplify that cruft.

You've never used the search on your Roku? This is exactly what it does.

So it's just a search feature? This Plex feature is more than just search. It seems it also allows browsing and discovery.

Never searched with Roku. It's basically the OS that runs streaming apps, and I never thought much more about it.

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