Streaming service Plex has long since grown beyond its original focus as a home for personal media, offering a more comprehensive solution for discovering, streaming and sharing content across services, including Plex's own ad-supported free TV and movies. Recently, the company added social networking functionality and is currently expanding that functionality by rolling out new features. Notably, this includes ways to share your Plex profile publicly and tools for others to read and then comment on your TV and movie reviews.

Plex first launched the social network in November 2023 with a feature called "Discover Together," which allowed users to create a profile on the service and then find and follow friends to see what they were watching. (The feature initially received some backlash, as some Plex users were unhappy with the nature of its opt-out. Plex now notes that content marked as adult won't appear in users' activity charges, which was one of the concerns users had. )

While it's a shift for the company, offering a more social experience on Plex allows it to better compete not only with other free, ad-supported streamers, but also with dedicated movie and TV reviews Social networks such as Letterboxd and TV Time compete.

Plex says that with today's launch, users will now be able to share a public URL that points to their service profile at watch.plex.tv. By default, others on Plex can find the user through the app's search unless they have turned off this feature in settings.

People viewing your user profile will be able to see what you've been watching, what's on your watchlist, and more. Plex notes that this won't change any of your existing privacy settings.

Additionally, Plex users can choose to have their ratings and reviews visible to other users on Plex through a new setting. Here, you can choose to allow anyone to view these comments or only those who are logged in to Plex. You can also choose to have your reviews visible only to friends or friends of friends, or you can make all ratings and reviews private if you want.

In addition to social networking features, Plex is rolling out a preview of its new user interface, initially on Apple TV. The redesign includes updated navigation, more customization of personal media, easier feature access, a richer experience with more artwork, and Plex's various social networking features, the company said in the announcement.

For premium users, Plex Pass subscribers (paid users) will get access to HEVC hardware encoding for better video quality while saving bandwidth. This option was previously in preview mode for some users, but is now available to all subscribers.