Gadgetory

this is Ross Miller with a virgin I am sitting here with Keith Valerie the CEO of plex Steve thank you so much for joining us this week thanks for having so I wanna get into a lot of stuff let's start top level I don't wanna suppose there's anything what is Plex so Plex is a media app that helps people manage all of their media collections so video collections photo collections music collections we add a lot of metadata and other related content to that and give you kind of powerful organizational tools and then allows you to stream that to all of you virtually all of your devices all of our big screen apps are free and you know honestly that's been the goal over time is to make sure as many people can use this as product as possible so we want to make it free and kind of open up the funnel with so many different media player apps you're like juggling a number of code bases like what it what is the support staff behind it now how how much of a hurdle is it's like keep all these like different apps like support it cuz it's wet Smart TVs you basically have as many almost as like Netflix at this point because of you know with I don't know what if that is seven or eight languages were able to cover a lot you know hundreds and hundreds of devices and the big one of course that just came out of the big the problem was the Apple TV one you guys famously had this post about like it took five weeks to develop we got this up just like I think a week after the MTV launched what was the reaction to that in terms of like just like not know it means like online people really loved it online but like how much of a subscriber booth did you get from the Apple TV we absolutely got a subscriber boost what was interesting as well is that a lot of our current users switched over to it very quickly that's still you know in a short period of time we still it's not in the top apps that we have right now but it's climbing very very quickly what is the top one I would say probably the Roku is probably the most you streaming device the web app is actually probably the most used device and iOS and Android are pretty kind of neck and neck as well so and now that you kind of curse it so you never like any issues in terms of like the content itself and I want to kind of get to this because like Plex TV you know you were started open source become a for-profit company you know and a lot of the content that people use it's their own personal media library but we're not really talked about where that kind of comes from I'm you know I think it's fair to say piracy is a big part of that and I think it makes Plex is really nice does no matter what the content is you don't discriminate you do clean it up and make it nice almost make it user right what is your personal opinion like we certainly don't condone piracy at all and there is lots of ways to get lots of great legitimate content into the system we have music and photos and a lot of people use a lot of guys on our team use kind of DVR'd content to get it into the system importantly one of the important aspects of Plex is that you have this very secure private content collection because we are managing people's photo libraries in their home video libraries we don't have any view into the content that people have and by our Terms of Service we make sure that you know people have rights to that content part of Plex past and I was like you've actually somewhat become a content provider because VEVO is a part of that deal that makes it much easier to get that something was interesting that Netflix it said yesterday the claim they make is whenever Netflix launches in the country the piracy rate goes down now obviously very clear like you don't condone any piracy and you don't know what people are using but do you feel that there's an interest as you're going forward to kind of become a content provider anyways you're performing in a sense that might yeah legitimate like the libraries in the content you feel responsibility for that the way I'll answer that is kind of thinking big picture this is not like something that we're about to release in the next you know three or four months but I think the way we view the world is will we be a content provider will we own content or license content and I don't know if that's the direction we'll go what we do want to make sure is that people can always come to one beautiful consistent app on whichever device they're on that app knows who they are knows what their preferences are the organization is the same whether they're on their iPhone or their xbox or their you know Roku or Apple TV and I should be able to get you to the continent you want right you should not have to go to all these different silos and you know try and figure out like gosh I want to see this movie but I don't know where I can find it right we should be able to do that so I think over time whether it's us linking you deep linking you into services like Netflix or Hulu or HBO or us having some content deal we want to make sure that you can come to one place and get all that content great well Kate thank you so much for sitting down with us yeah I think watching if you want any more CES news anymore gadget coverage anything relate to arts culture science technology you know you know the drill you can check us out on the verge comm or subscribe to our YouTube channel a lot more videos like this and even ones with like robots will get robust next time I promise that is a subscription at youtube.com slash The Verge