Ahhh the app dance. You know the one—where you sit down with the best intentions of watching a movie but after 30 minutes of pin-balling from one streaming app to the next you finally surrender the remote and fall asleep to Seinfeld…again. If this familiar routine gives you the icks, you’re not alone. Not long ago, we stumbled onto this amazing fact: On average, viewers in the US alone spend over 600 million minutes every single night trying to figure out what to watch [Accenture]. For the golden age of streaming, that feels a bit… broken. In fact, the majority of television subscribers find it frustrating to navigate between different streaming services, and 44% of streaming audiences say they can’t find anything at all [Horowitz]. We’ve all spent countless time juggling all of our different subscriptions and free services, jumping from Disney+ to HBO Max to Hulu to Amazon Prime to Apple TV+ and back, not to mention ad-supported streaming, plus rentals or purchases, only to still not know what to watch. It’s what we’ve affectionately named the streaming struggle.

So, the question is, how do we make streaming fun, easy, and delightful—taking out the struggle, but also making sure the sense of discovery and surprise is still there? Our solution was to find a way to give you access to anything and everything in the streaming universe from a single destination. Less searching, more watching. Bye, bye, streaming struggle.

It’s the What That Matters, Not the Where

As you all know, at Plex, we take our media incredibly seriously. And when we started to have the nightly problems of untangling all of our different services, it occurred to us that there had to be a better way. But who could do it? Clearly HBO Max didn’t want to tell you what was on Hulu, and Netflix wants you to watch Ryan Reynolds in Red Notice without alerting you that Ryan Reynolds is also starring in Free Guy on Disney+ as well as on HBO Max (a most confusing state of affairs). As a consumer, it’s the “what,” not the “where,” that matters. Meaning, we care way more about the movies, shows, actors, and filmmakers than we care about which apps carry them.

So we started to dream up a rather big dream—a system that unifies all of your subscription services, all of your watchlists, and all of your recommendations into one easy-to-use app.

Houston, We Have Discovery

Today, we’re proud to be launching an entirely new section of Plex, focused on discovering, searching, and personalizing movies and TV shows across virtually any streaming service—whether it’s Plex’s own free movies and TV, or your other subscriptions like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and as many of the various personal media libraries you have access to. As of today, Plex searches, personalizes, and organizes all of your content, no matter where that content lives. Now, when you log in on any of our major platforms, including Roku, Apple TV+, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, iOS and Android mobile devices, smart TVs, game consoles, and the web app, you’ll get a new welcome screen that will invite you to customize your preferences.

Then comes the fun part. A whole new world of daily discoveries will greet you from your home screen. See what’s new and trending from all of your selected services (whether it’s Amazon Prime, Paramount+, Funimatio