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this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Nah. Cool that you think that, though. The moment they started charging for what was a free service, they lost me. I have gigabit internet. The only reason i used their service to begin with was ease of use.
Hot take but maybe everything doesn't need to be an infinitely expanding business. Just imagine for a second that it's fine for something to just break even, pay for the few mainteners salaries and not expand the business at all ever. I know that I just uttered the cardinal evil under capitalism but fucking seriously. The primary userbase of plex is pirates. The whole incentive is not having to pay for a streaming service. Charging money for it is just torpedoing your entire userbase. The entire appeal of Plex was it not charging money.
Yah and I still bought a plexpass and then left Plex. Do I care no I got my money worth. Software costs money how would they continue to developed it if not getting paid?
Apparently a hot take as evidenced the downvotes on my other comments here, but by adding things people want instead of taking away things people already have and charging more for it.
They don't even have the excuse that they need to pay for the bandwidth costs of relaying video from servers to clients. Video is streamed directly from the user's self-hosted server, using UPnP or NAT-PMP to make the server accessible from outside the local network.
just for ref, I'm not downvoting you. They do offer some things that cost them dev/money/time. And some of those things are pain points on Jellyfin.
They give you SSL and dynamic DNS style stuff behind the scenes. They give you a remote service that tells you if you're remotely visible. They cache the tvdb and manage some subscriptions for EPG and do a pretty good job partnering with (and presumably caching) open subtitles.
None of that makes up for their rug-pulling bullshit.
You used to be able to download shit to your phone then become a local server so other people on your local network could watch off your device.
You used to be able to run 3rd party plugins improving libraries and storing off youtube meta
They're scrapping watch together
They're scrapping free remote
They're spiraling the drain... But I won't miss them, I'll miss what they once were.
They also offer free tunneling for people that can't port-forward because they are locked behind cgnat. To be fair, the tunneling is limited to potato quality 2mbps bitrate, but that is a significant cost to them still
If you want free, there are alternatives. Plex is a business, with employees. Plex pass is their business model.
I think locking remote play is entirely enshitification however, but I get it. Plex model has them provide authentication and relay services. They are now trying to push their own streaming services which I expect is a real money sink.
I actually jumped ship a while back. I agree that Plex is a business and they do deserve to get paid for development and infrastructure costs, but it's the blatant enshitification that I have a big issue with.
They chose to lock a previously-free feature behind a paywall for everybody and asked for even more money to get it back. The less shitty alternative would have been to ask only the users who needed to use the relays to purchase a Plex Pass. Or, if they wanted to make it seem like a positive thing, they could have made the new subscription into an "enhanced quality" remote streaming experience that enabled higher bitrates over relays.
They gave their users the middle finger by picking the most transparently greedy option that they could get away with justifying.
I don’t know when or how, but it seems in my lifetime we went from that. Having corporations that just did something well and left it at that to this idiotic grow or die mentality that seems to be fueled by investor ROI.
So, you've got option. You can just roll your own, or go to jellyfin.
I'm one of the first people to complain about the incessant need to grow 20% a year to appease shareholders and how unsustainable that is. But I also realize as I said, stuff cost money and "just breaking even" will also grow in cost every year with everything else, so... Even in that perfect world you were describing, there would be an increase in cost applied to that project.
Much like I am sure you expect at the very least a cost of living raise each year. I'm also guessing you're glad your paycheck to bills ratio isn't what it was 20y ago. (or I can say, that for me that is true). I'm pretty happy my discretionary money is more now than it was then. I bet those developers also want that same thing.