Josh Hendrickson
Plex offers a Live TV and DVR service that allows you to watch, stream, and record Live TV through a digital tuner and antenna. Recently, Plex made the Live TV (but not DVR) portion of that service free for three months. But, Plex’s Live TV was often a buggy, subpar experience. Now the company says it has a fix.
On its blog, Plex was surprisingly honest about the issues Plex Live TV was seeing. Sometimes it could take 12 or more seconds to tune a channel. Often, using the “play from the beginning” feature didn’t work right, especially when you were watching a show live. Even resuming an in-progress recording didn’t work.
Now the company says it should only take a few seconds to turn a channel, and playing from the beginning and resuming a recording should work correctly now.
The company also added a layer of fresh paint, or least a design overhaul. You’ll see more featured rows now that gather similar content together, which should make it easier to discover shows you like. Recent interface changes are also making their way to more platforms.
One welcome change is a live preview of channels when you’re in the “TV Guide” style view. Land on a particular channel, and you’ll get a picture-in-picture style view without leaving the guide.
And the company says it’s rolling out Chromecast integration on iOS (with Android to follow soon). Overall Live TV should look better, react faster, and do a better job of finding the start of an episode.
Those are good updates, as the company just made Live TV free for the next few months. Some of these changes rely on DVR recording, which isn’t free, but everyone should benefit to some degree.
Source: Plex
