Plex
Streaming service and media server
Why this is trending
Interest in “Plex” spiked on Wikipedia on 2026-07-26.
Categorised under Business & Economy, this article fits a familiar pattern. wt.cat.business.2
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Key Takeaways
- is an American software and media streaming company.
- Plex had 16 million streaming subscribers as of 2023.
- History Plex began as a freeware hobby project in December 2007 when developer Elan Feingold created a media center application for his Mac by porting the media player XBMC (since renamed Kodi) to Mac OS X.
- They contacted him and offered support and funding, and they formed a three-person team in January 2008.
- The developers continued collaborating with the Linux-based XBMC project until May 21, 2008.
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Source summary
WikipediaPlex Inc. is an American software and media streaming company. It runs its namesake ad-supported streaming television service and develops media server software that enables users to stream their personal media collections to their devices. Plex had 16 million streaming subscribers as of 2023. It is based in Campbell, California.
Plex began as a freeware hobby project in December 2007 when developer Elan Feingold created a media center application for his Mac by porting the media player XBMC (since renamed Kodi) to Mac OS X. Around the same time, Cayce Ullman and Scott Olechowski—software executives who had recently sold their previous company to Cisco—were also looking to port XBMC to Mac OS X, and noticed Feingold's progress in the XBMC online forums. They contacted him and offered support and funding, and they formed a three-person team in January 2008.
The team released early versions of the port, called OSXBMC, intended for eventual full integration into Mac OS X. The developers continued collaborating with the Linux-based XBMC project until May 21, 2008. Due to different goals from the XBMC team, they forked the code that became Plex, and published it on GitHub. The OSXBMC code was kept roughly in sync with the upstream XBMC code. In July 2008, the project was renamed Plex.
Content sourced from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0