Plex has reaffirmed its commitment to personal media management. It comes a week after it launched a new video-on-demand service with several big publishers. According to Plex, some users took this as a sign that Plex was moving away from personal media management but it said that this is absolutely not the case.
The project said that despite the launch of video-on-demand, personal media still comes first. It pointed out that the new feature is an “optional supplement” designed for those times when you run out of things to watch or if you have issues with your offline media. Plex also pointed out that the video on demand feature has “no performance impact at all” on your personal server as all the content is delivered by Plex.
In order to provide content for free, the firm has opted to include advertisements throughout the shows; in its statement, it confirmed your personal library doesn’t impact which ads are displayed:
“This should go without saying—we do not collect information about the contents of your personal library. We do not run ads against your personal media. We don’t share this info with anyone (given we don’t know it in the first place, how could we?). Nothing here has changed with the rollout of free movies & TV.”
If the point about data collection got you wondering about what information Plex does collect, you can head over to their privacy policy to find out all of the details.