On June 1, 2017, Plex started rolling out support for Live TV. Available within the Android TV and iOS apps, the utility, which is currently in beta mode, allows Plex users to stream live anywhere in the world.
Today’s announcement makes Plex an attractive one-stop-shop for all your live and recorded TV needs. The utility not only allows you to stream TV to your device, but also take control over your own media and bring it to almost any device with a screen.
Users will need a Plex Pass subscription, and Plex Live TV needs a digital tuner and an antenna to grab the free OTA signal that carries live media.
Plex also says that once you have this set up, you’ll have access to 86 of the top 100 network TV shows in the United States.
Cord cutters rejoice!
With Plex TV, an Amazon Prime subscription and a signup with Netflix, users can access some of the most popular shared and original content in the world, and it’s likely to cost less every month than maintaining a cable box.
That said, one of the biggest reasons people don’t cut their cords is because it’s bundled with their Internet connection. That seems to be the strongest hold that traditional cable providers like Comcast have over their massive subscriber bases. Users say that the sheer inconvenience of stopping their cable service is not worth the effort.
Traditional TV will live on for several more years, but with new services like Plex Live TV, the number of options outside of traditional cable providers is growing by the year. Over the next several years, we’ll likely see cable number tapering off, until it reaches new lows. That’s when large cable providers will become fringe providers, with options like Plex TV becoming mainstream.
That time is still several years away, possibly a decade or more. For now, the options keep increasing, attracting more users to the streaming fold every quarter.
In 2016, Netflix added 4.693 million subscribers in the United States, of whom 4.504 million were paid subscribers. Internationally, they added a whopping 14.341 million subscribers.
On top of that, Amazon Prime Video is being pushed into millions of homes every year along with Amazon Prime subscriptions. Amazon said it added “tens of millions” of Prime subscribers during 2016, which indicates a minimum of 20 million. More likely a lot more than that.
Video streaming is undeniably a growing market, and it can only come at the cost of traditional methods of broadcasting content. Even though it could take a really long time to happen, it inevitably will. Plex Live TV is simply one more nail in that coffin.
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