Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. In this newsletter: Plex CPO Scott Olechowski on Letterboxd and what’s next for social on Plex.

Last week, news broke that the New York Times is in advanced discussions to acquire Letterboxd. The Times is reportedly ready to spend $330 million for the site, and has plans to keep Letterboxd operating as a standalone site “for the foreseeable future.” Letterboxd is said to generate $15 million in revenue this year, and reportedly has 30 million monthly active users.

Those are impressive numbers for a startup that was bootstrapped until a Canadian holding company acquired a majority stake in 2023. And with Letterboxd being so squarely focused on movies, all this raises the question: Why hasn’t anyone succeeded at building the Letterboxd for TV shows?

To get some answers, I decided to catch up with Plex Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski this week. Plex has been building out its own social features for a few years now, allows users to publicly post lists, reviews and discussions of movies and TV shows, and recently surpassed 50 million users for its Watchlist feature. 

According to Olechowski, there’s a lot more to come over the next few months. “The social piece is going to become more and more front and center as we go forward, especially on mobile,” he tells me.

One of the features coming to Plex’s mobile apps soon: a social feed.

“We're going to start using the mobile app as more of the proving ground for [social],” Olechowski says. “You'll start to see it become more integrated into the front and center for the folks that are using it, giving you an actual feed of what's happening.”