This week Plex announced a new partnership that should excite their users. They will be working with Warner Brothers to allow users to stream a library of WB movies for free. Who doesn’t want free access to movies?
Of course, nothing is really free. Ads will interrupt your movie watching. It’s not a new or surprising business model, but it’s one that is at least mildly annoying. While we’re all used to seeing ads while watching TV shows, most find commercial breaks in movies far more distracting.
The advertisements aren’t the biggest reason that some might be worried about this new partnership between Plex and Warner Bros. The bigger reason is the potential impact on your privacy. When we received notification of the new partnership from Plex it included the following:
In addition, with its robust and transparent streaming media platform, Plex puts content providers back in control of their brand by gaining actionable insights into content popularity, user engagement, and viewer usage data [emphasis added] (all available on an affirmative opt-in basis by Plex users). Both advertisers and content providers will reach new viewers on an international scale with unprecedented insights, data, and analytics — more than any other streaming service.
That bit in there about viewer usage data being sent to Warner Brothers immediately set off some alarms. What data will they share? Let’s be honest here, not everyone is using Plex for entirely above-board activity. We never condone or recommend piracy, but it’s safe to say that a large percentage of Plex users have pirated content in their media libraries. Should those users worry? Will Warner Bros. now have access to seeing just what’s in those libraries? Will they know which users are watching the content? Could this be a back-door attempt at building up legal cases against Plex users?
So we went digging for the answers to these questions. First, we dug into Plex’s privacy policy. In it we found the following:
As described above, client playback data does not identify what content was played, does not identify what server the content was played from, does not identify the owner of the server that the content was played from, and is generalized.
Similarly, the server playback does not identify what content was played, does not identify which client accessed the content, does not identify the user who played it, and is generalized.
Plex Privacy Policy
That doesn’t directly speak to the relationship with Warner Bros. though, so we simply asked Plex for an answer. Details about personal libraries aren’t shared with Warner Brothers. Neither are their viewing habits. The only data WB will receive from Plex is related to WB’s specific library of content.
We think that makes it pretty clear. Information about your personal media collection will not be sent off to WB. If you were nervous about legal ramifications, or just slightly embarrassed about some of your viewing choices, you don’t need to fear. With that out of the way, what are your thoughts on other aspects about the announcement? Are you okay with watching a few ads during a movie? Do you feel like Plex is trying to put too much into their app? Josh and Richard spoke about these topics on the latest episode of Entertainment 2.0, and we’d love to hear your thoughts too!
