Build Your Movie & TV Watchlist

A watchlist is where you keep the movies and shows you plan to get to later, so you stop relying on memory. On Plex the same list covers the streaming services you subscribe to as well as anything sitting on a Plex Media Server you can reach, and Plex's own free Movies & Shows sits alongside it. Because the list lives with your account, it is not tied to one app or one screen.

Yes. You need a Plex account, and creating one costs nothing. There is no credit card at signup and no subscription behind the watchlist itself. Plex Pass exists as a paid subscription for other features, and one of them lets you generate an RSS feed of your list, though building the list and using it every day never depends on paying for anything.

You tell Plex which services you use, and it checks those first when it looks for a title. Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, Max and Apple TV are among the services people commonly connect, and Plex's free Movies & Shows catalog is always in the mix. What shows up varies by country, since the same title is rarely available in the same places everywhere.

No. A free Plex account is enough on its own, and plenty of people use the watchlist without ever running a server. If you do have one, or if a friend has shared theirs with you, those libraries become another place Plex can find a title you have saved. Server libraries need to use the Plex Movie or Plex TV Series metadata agents for that to work.

Open a movie or show and choose Add to Watchlist. On phones and TVs you can press and hold a poster to get the same option, and in the web app it sits in the menu beside a search result or a trailer. If a title is already saved, that button reads Remove from Watchlist instead. Seasons and individual episodes cannot be saved, only whole movies and shows.

Yes. The list belongs to your Plex account rather than to any single app, so a title you save on your phone during a commute is already there when you sit down with the TV remote. The same holds in reverse and on the web. Signing in is the only step, and nothing needs to be exported, refreshed, or copied from one device to another.

The watchlist appears in Plex apps on iOS and Android, on Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and supported smart TVs, on PlayStation and Xbox, on Windows, macOS and Linux desktops, and in the Plex web app. A few of the TV and console apps cannot jump straight into another streaming service's app, so they will search for it instead of opening it directly.

You can. A title that is still months away can go on the list the moment you hear about it, and Plex shows the expected release date underneath it while you wait. Once it arrives on a service you use, it moves into the part of your watchlist that is ready to play. Films that are only in theaters will not carry a streaming date yet.

If you watched it through Plex's free Movies & Shows, it comes off the list on its own. Titles played from a Plex Media Server need watch state syncing turned on for your account before Plex can tell they are finished. Anything you watched inside another service's app has to be removed by hand, since Plex does not see what happens there.

Yes. Opening anything from your watchlist brings up a details page that lists everywhere the title is currently playing, including your own Plex Media Server, any server a friend has shared with you, the services you have selected, and other services beyond those. Titles that are available right now also gather in a separate row, so you can go straight to something watchable.

That is yours to decide. Privacy settings on your Plex profile control who can see your watchlist, your watch history and your ratings, and you can adjust each one separately. Friends see whatever you have opened up to friends, while people who only follow you never see anything marked private. You can change any of it later from your profile without touching the list itself.

There are a couple of ways. If your profile privacy allows it, a friend on Plex can open your profile and browse what you have saved. Plex Pass subscribers can also generate an RSS feed for their own watchlist or a friend's, which can be dropped into a feed reader or a blog. Friends' privacy rules still apply to those feeds, and identities stay hidden.