cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639

I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That’s it folks. I’ve been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.

They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.

I’ll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I’ve been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it’s time to make it production ready.

Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.

And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:

  • YES I know I’m unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
  • My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don’t understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn’t have to, that’s why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
  • Plex is still removing functionality. I don’t care that “People should pay their fair share”. If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that’s completely okay. They are removing functionality.
    • “But they have cloud costs”. Remote streaming is negligible to them. It’s a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That’s it.
    • “Good luck finding another remote streaming” - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that’s a separate conversation). All “remote streaming” is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported “free” content that they’re probably losing money on.

In short, I don’t care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They’re removing functionality that has been free for years. I’m not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    101·
    1 day ago

    This change, is absolutely benign for the vast majority. Which means it’s a desperate grab to make more money which will ultimately fail.

    Check out the trend over time.

    They removed plugins when it was a threat to them controlling their ecosystem, people were using them to pull from YouTube and anime sources directly. They were basically turning them into Kodi, but with benefits

    They did the same thing with offline resharing. You used to be able to sync a bunch of crap to your phone, go on vacation and share it with your family from your phone.

    Then they started obnoxiously tracking you under the guise that you could see what your friends were watching, but they changed their terms so they could sell your watch data to third parties.

    Then they started putting ads into free remote watch

    Now there’s no more free remote watch.

    As you said, this change is unlikely to make a big difference for anybody, so it’s unlikely for them to make any serious money from it.

    My personal guess is, they’re sitting on a fuck ton of venture capital promises and those bills are coming due with the market becoming questionable.

    They’ve done everything to the free crowd to increase revenue. If they are truly cash strapped, the next logical thing is to get all these people with lifetime passes to buy in again but on a subscription basis. That means they’re either going to abandon the lifetime product like playon did, or find some other way to force everyone to pay monthly to watch their own content.

    Nobody seen anybody needs to switch to jellyfin but you’re going to need a backup plan because inside of the next year or two chances are Plex is not going to be recognizable to you.

    • MaggiWuerze@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Nobody seen anybody needs to switch to jellyfin

      I guess you haven’t read the rest of the comments here :D

      At this point I just wait and see. I have Jellyfin running in parallel, but the way remote sharing works there, basically requiring a VPN on every client device makes it a non starter for a large portion of my users and with the security situation of the Jellyfin Backend I don’t feel comfortable making it available through my domain.

      So for now I will just wait and see and hope that the Jellyfin fanbase could just chill a bit and stop gloating and high giving any time there’s a Plex related news on here