We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
Glad I bought the Plex Pass like 13 years ago. While I understand everyone seems to think everything should be free, I’m sure your boss wishes you worked for free too, but the world doesn’t work that way.
I’m OK supporting products I use , and Plex is an example of this for me. It was a well spend $75 in 2013
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hot take here but not wrong
No, it’s still wrong.
We have ways to do NAT traversal and hole punching on consumer routers. Failing that, UPnP and port forwarding exist. Or, god forbid, IPv6.
In the rare case that literally none of those are an option, they would have to use TURN to relay between an intermediary. That is a reasonable case to ask the user to pay for their bandwidth usage, but they don’t have to be greedy fuckers by making everyone pay for it.
This is enshittification and corporate greed. Nothing more, nothing less.
They make a product. It’s not just the cost of infrastructure.
They have developers and other employees
And this isn’t a new feature they’re adding. Remote streaming was already implemented and generally available to users.
I don’t discount there being a cost in maintaining code over time, but it’s not as though they have to spend any significant employee time on improving it. They already support UPnP and NAT-PMP to have the clients connect directly to the self-hosted servers.
It would be nice if they added NAT hole punching on top of that, but it’s evidently good enough to work as-is in its current form. If they’re not even running relays to support more tricky networks (which the linked support article has no mention of), keeping this feature free costs them literally nothing extra.
I fucking hope to god they don’t go full enshittification and decide to revoke the lifetime licenses.
Nah they’ll just release Plex2
Right ya at some point there will be a PlexPass Pro lol
I keep expecting something, the lifetime pass has more/less paid for itself.
That being said, they do still offer the lifetime pass, so clearly they see it as worth it.
Even with Plex pass they were really pushing their paid content. Much happier with Jellyfin, and it was very easy to switch.
Your view unfortunately doesn’t show you how shitty the unpaid experience has become. XBMC used to be a good product. Since becoming Plex, now we have:
- no local hardware accel
- no HDR
- panels that look like local videos that trick you into switching to a paid app
- rearranged home screen after some updates
- no downloads on remote devices
- and now I’ll lose the ability to share streaming with my kid, who lives many cities away
If this were clear from the outset , no one would be upset. But pulling back features Plex at one time promised “forever” (remote streaming), is complete rug-pull bullshit.
You can enjoy that warm and fuzzy reverse-fomo feeling now, but you should know that they’ll start limiting your paid experience eventually.
Xbmc didn’t become plex. It’s still alive and kicking but rebranded to Kodi (mostly because it had little to do with xbox anymore) ages ago.
Yes, you’re right, I forgot about the forking.
what? all of these work on plex for me:
-server hardware accel transcoding (are you talking about something else?)
-HDR playback works fine for me…
-I can download just fine from a browser or the plex app, when remote
I mean, I’m with you, it is nice to support something you use, financially. But you made a one time payment 12 years ago. Your money is certainly not there anymore, they used it and paid something with it. I don’t know, it just sounds like a really weird take reading your post. But maybe its me whose weird, I would prefer one time payment over subscriptions too.
Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I’m fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.
I wonder how much money Plex still makes through their lifetime purchases. Is it that they were struggling and then made bad business decisions with the aim on increasing revenue (ad supported video on demand)? Or was it the other way around?
In the 80s new systems usually came with new OSs, which required porting software it. Thus a lifetime license was practically limited.
I wouldn’t be as opposed to a subscription model if it was cheaper and they focused on their actual core product, not all the other fluff around. 5€/m is a bit much given they don’t pay for my bandwidth. And if they didn’t store my media info, history etc…
I have no idea how well it works in reality, but I can imagine the Lifetime Pass being a good business model for them: only the most enthusiastic user will pay for 3 years up front (lifetime currently costs 3x the yearly). So when they get a Lifetime pass they’re getting 3 years paid up front and an evangelist who will probably tell their friends about Plex. If that Lifetime subscriber gets even one person to sign up for a yearly sub who otherwise wouldn’t have, then Plex came out ahead.
Did you notice what you said there each major version. Plex has been rolling releases for years. Maybe they should have done Plex 1 2 etc. yes software has been that way forever but you would pay for a version and then a year later pay for another one. Now people expect to pay once and get upgrades forever.
Sure, I’m not saying Plex has to do a single-payment model. Just that it’s a think that’s been done successfully (and for longer than Plex has existed). Everyone’s pushing subscription models so hard that it’s easy to think “this is the only possible way that anything can work”.
Now people expect to pay once and get upgrades forever.
Because they’re called “lifetime passes” voluntarily offered by the company. It seems weird to act like people are being entitled about this or that their $75-$120 one-time payment is meaningless compared to someone who’s only paid $5 or worse using it for free.
I looked at and look at it as an investment. 13 years ago it could have been a good decision or a bad one.
The idea behind a lifetime membership is a means to spark fund raising, and I thought then “I use this a lot, it works for me I’m gonna pay for it”.
You’re right the guy who paid $5 once for a month of Plex Pass is way more valuable than the one who paid $75 (or $120 full price). The only people more valuable to the company than the $5 guy are the ones who use the app for free.
Yeah, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal for most people here. They kept the price down as long as possible. I spent $119 just before the 'rona hit and I think it’s been well worth it.
What did you pay for exactly?
What are you asking? I bought a lifetime subscription to Plex pass.
OK, but why is it a for profit company in the first place?
And why does open source Software like xz, ffmpeg, etc still work without being for profit?
Fucking liberal.
They don’t. Most people get paid by companies to work on that stuff. For example red hat pays for a lot of OS development.
You know nothing very proudly
