Digital Home Thoughts: Plex Media Server Partners With LG To Integrate Closer With LG HDTV's

"This is pretty amazing news! The Mac XBMC spin-off, Plex, has inked a deal with LG to bring their platform to NetCast enabled HDTVs and Blu-ray players in 2011. The company cites Plex's media server capabilities, ability to aggregate content from multiple sources (online and locally), and its drop dead simple and attractive UI as the main reason for Plex's inclusion into the NetCast offering. However, the way Plex will work on these TVs, according to the Plex Blog, is a cloud-based Plex App will be included in NetCast for accessing online content and services, which Plex is known for, and then have the ability to pull in additional content from "a Plex Media Server running anywhere in the house" (I'm guessing the app will be compatible with other UPnP media servers as well). I've got to be thinking this news must have the folks at Boxee and Apple (among others) spinning for the reason they both have expressed intentions of getting on the TV itself instead of assisting the TV with an adapter / media streamer device. FYI, Plex Media Server will be coming to other OSes, besides Mac OS X, in the near future (the LG rep in the demo below says a Windows version of Plex Media Server should be out by November)."

LG has announced a deal with Plex that will see the XMBC like media server included in future netcast enabled LG HDTV's. Integrated media servers and TV's are something I expect to see more and more of now as manufacturers start to move towards a more centralised hub for entertainment. Whether that is something that we want as customers remains to be seen, but I can certainly see the logic for doing so.