Here at Plex, we live and breathe media. We collect it, make it beautiful, argue about it with friends, and fall asleep to it. For many of us, Plex was “nights and weekends” before it was a job—we are the tinkerers, the hackers, the builders. We’ve rallied around common goals, working towards a shared vision. We may not agree on everything, like which set of Star Wars movie posters are best, which Blade Runner cut is the best—duh, the Final one—or whether or not single-ended tube amps are worth the trouble. For us, media is somewhere between a hobby and an obsession, and honestly, much closer to the latter.

Plex is not a monolithic company; we have a full-time core, an extended ring of part-timers, a growing group of amazing Plex Ninjas, and then of course our beloved community at large. There have been plenty of cases where people move between these orbitals, sparked by a passion project. For example, Eric wrote an early incarnation of the web app, and now runs all of web for us; Ian wrote lots of channels in the early days and now runs the client teams; I started working on the software known as OSXBMC almost exactly ten years ago, bored and lonely while my wife was away; there are plenty more examples.

It’s exactly this ethos which makes us proud to launch Plex Labs, with a few initial goals:

In-depth technical writing around all that is Plex: Our blog has worked to maintain a proper balance between someone who might be new to Plex, and a more technical audience. We decided that having a separate publication on Medium would be a better approach for us to “let loose” with some deeper discussions, and maybe the occasional longer post on JavaScript frameworks.

Our blog has worked to maintain a proper balance between someone who might be new to Plex, and a more technical audience. We decided that having a separate publication on Medium would be a better approach for us to “let loose” with some deeper discussions, and maybe the occasional longer post on JavaScript frameworks. Celebrate internal passion projects: We can’t help it, media is fun! What’s an engineer to do on a rainy weekend if it’s not build something cool? And now we have a way to share these projects with you. Sure, they’re unsupported, but they might also be awesome.

Give exposure to great community projects: There are people out there doing amazing things with Plex, and we love their creativity. It can be hard for a regular user to find these projects, which might be hidden away on a forum, and, well, we think they’re crazy cool.

We’re launching the new Plex Labs section of our website today, along with our first Plex Labs post on Medium. If you’ve got a Plex music library and long for the days when a certain music player (that really whipped the llama’s ass) had a permanent spot in the corner of your screen, this is a special day, because we’re doing a Plex Labs debut of a great little player we call Plexamp. If you don’t use Plex for music, you just might start…



Dr. Barkley Brown