Plex, the free streaming app, laid off approximately 20% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned, which will affect all departments, including the Personal Media teams.
“This is by far the hardest decision we’ve had to make at Plex,” CEO Keith Valory said in a statement. “These are all wonderful people, great colleagues, and good friends. But we believe it is the right thing for the long-term health and stability of Plex.”
The streaming app gives users a single destination to upload and organize content (video, audio and photos) from their own server while also allowing them to stream it via mobile app, smart TV or desktop.
In recent years, however, Plex has invested in free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) and live TV offerings. The FAST market has become saturated as many companies have entered the space. Plus, the overall advertising industry has taken a hit, making it harder for companies to earn enough revenue.
Valory noted in his statement that the company was significantly impacted by the slowdown. “While we adjusted our business plan last year after the shift in equity markets to get us back on a path to profitability without having to cut personnel expenses, the downturn in the ad market in Q2 put significantly more pressure on our business and ultimately it became clear that we would need to take additional measures in order to maintain a confident path to profitability within the next 18 months,” he said.
He added that the company is still expected to see 30% growth this year.
According to a Slack message from Valory, obtained by The Verge, which first reported the layoffs, Valory noted that 37 employees would be impacted.
Additionally, it seems that Plex may have had another round of layoffs earlier this year. Five months ago, a former account executive posted on LinkedIn that they were “affected by company layoffs.”
As of January, the company had 175 employees, and its revenue was in the double-digit millions.
Updated 6/29/23 at 12:10 p.m. ET with a statement from CEO.
You must log in or register to comment.
It seems like in the last few years the company’s focus has primarily been on adding things to Plex that I do not want as part of Plex. And not adding the audiobook support that I do want.
There was a webtools addon that could add this. I think it’s still out there but I forget the name. I know plugins were disabled, but this did still and does still work for me.
I have tried the plugins, they just don’t work as well as smart audiobook player.
I have a huge audiobook library, I was fully prepared to do all the processes to move and organize my mess of a library to get it working with Plex. I’m sure you’ve seen the GitHub guide floating around.
But when it came time to sit down and configure my server for audiobooks, ebooks, tv, movies, and music, I found that audiobookshelf just did a way better job with less of a headache. My current stack is Beet.io with audible support to move my already downloaded library into a better folder and naming structure. Once I get those all finished I won’t have to use this step. This gets stuff about ~80% of the way there except when the source is really messed up.
From there I have Readarr looking at the Beets destination folder and managing downloads. This is pretty good for getting most of the rest of the info with some clean up and is similar to setting up other Arrs. Then audiobookshelf for final tweaks and browsing/downloading.
It’s quite a pain to ingest an initial large library but for new downloads it’s been pretty seamless. Way easier and more consistent than having to do most of this anyway plus fight with Plex. I do still want them to add support, though.
The audiobookshelf app is pretty good for browsing and downloading but I think the player is way worse than Smart Audiobook Player. But what I do is just use the audiobookshelf app to download the books to Smart’s library folder and then use the best player app for listening.
Thanks! I’ll check out audiobookshelf.
Look up audiobookshelf if you’re willing to mess with docker a bit and forward a port or two. It’s open source and does a wonderful job.
Look up audiobookshelf if you’re willing to mess with docker a bit and forward a port or two. It’s open source and does a, wonderful job.
Audiobookshelf is great
deleted by creator
Jellyfin would be fine for “just me”. Unfortunately I need the media server to be super simple, so that the rest of my house can navigate without issues. Unfortunately IME Jellyfin is not there… yet.
I love it’s growth and I keep a close eye, but I’m still mainly using Plex for now. I run Emby and JF alongside it as well. As it currently stands, I think from an end user perspective it’s Plex > Emby > Jellyfin, but I’m looking forward to the day I can fully move to JF.
That said, I think they’re all getting really close.
Where do the users in ur house struggle? My family loves it. I was able to remedy all of their complaints with shitty band-aid fixes, but they work and they like and use it.
The biggest thing was syncing watch states across multiple servers. We have access to a number of Plex servers and it’s super simple to have the state of each episode synced & saved so you don’t need to think about it.
I tried a few plugins for Jellyfin but could never quite get there.
Outside of that we’ve had some other smaller issues. Not to be rude but the Android TV app is… bad. We have a lot of issues trying to fast forward / rewind in the app. Many times fast forwarding completely freezes playback, but if I fast forward to a point, hit back to go back to the episode page, then hit “resume from <time stamp I fast forwarded to>” it works great. So jumping from minute 1 to minute 10 doesn’t work, but going from min 1 to min 10, closing the episode, then hitting “Resume from minute 10” works great.
It’s a lot of small frustrating things like that. However, Jellyfin definitely has its upsides. It plays high bitrate / high res files more smoothly than Plex for sure, both from a local and remote network. I’m not against it, it just feels more like “something for a tech guy” and less like “something for the whole family” right now to me. I look forward to the day I can switch without concern though.
It’s interesting you say that because jellyfin tracks my familys watch times better than netflix. I will agree the apps are bad. I normally use a browser view on my xbox instead of the app lol. The only issue ive experienced is on one of my old smart tvs fast forwarding and pausing doesn’t work, but i chalk that up to it being a 9 year old smart tv.
How is it making double digit millions? Through deals with companies and plex passes?
Been thinking about migrating off Plex for a bit with performance hits, apps shoving their channels my way and their seeming decline from personal media. After propping up Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, now I’m considering Funkwhale for music and Jellyfin for video but I’ll have to test a bit more.
Oh well, worse-case scenario- at least we already have Jellyfin.
I really hope Jellyfin gets a leg up soon, as a Plex Lifetime Pass owner I have become more and more discontent with the platform.
When I paid for my personal licence, it included downloads for all my users, now its cutoff to only older users. I had expected that Plexamp would only be restricted to me while it was being developed, but it remains locked away from my users should never individually have a reason to subscribe for just themselves.
I bought my licence to support the company for the use of my server and I feel like they’ve only downgraded my service in the last couple years. Getting new users to jump through all of the hoops with their pinned content, only to have them ask me why there are adverts on my movies is frustrating.
I feel like very little has improved in the core product in years, my users default settings are still transcoding to the same bitrate, or 10x its bitrate. Every time I have made a valid suggestion on the old subreddit, the Plex devs had plenty of time to reject any and all criticism.
I don’t believe Plex is going to get much better and likely we will see further erosion of our licences as the company only focuses on free users and the FAST service. I will keep checking in on jellyfin and alternatives, hopefully they get a boost soon.
I only use plex because jellyfin remote is very difficult, especially when allowing other people on your account
You might give it a try, its a pretty well featured streaming platform. Has a ton of customization for some areas too.
I installed it, but, yet, still use plex instead. Jellyfin does have a native app for my streaming devices too. Plex- just has an interface I prefer at this time.
Jellyfin is way better at subtitles then plex.
I’m currently setting up jellyfin as a test run for just my music library to see how the metadata & customisation is managed, currently I’m struggling to merge an artist that has been split and the only suggestions I find is to edit the filenames.
check your metadata and set the correct artist there. for every issue related to that it has always been shitty (extended) metadata. (with people often claiming “no but it’s fine” until they take a real look at it and see that it’s shit).
so give it a look and clean that up e.g. with mp3tag and/or musicbrainz picard and you will be good to go.
Oooh this is gonna be a big problem for me, thanks for the heads up.
It could still be the learning curve, I don’t know for sure if it’s not able to merge artists
I only use plex because jellyfin remote is very difficult, especially when allowing other people on your account
Whew I’m glad I just started up my jellyfin server!
As someone who’s been laid off, it always annoys me when people at the top try to act all hurt. Their name was never brought up as a potential layoff. The decision wasn’t nearly as hard as getting laid off.
Those who made the decision to go after the FAST market and lose money aren’t the ones getting laid off, it’s the ones who followed and built it. The risky outcome was never on the heads of those deciding to take the risk.
‘Some of you may die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take’
That doesn’t make it easy, knowing you have to make a choice that negatively impacts people that have dedicated time and parts of their lives to your project. Having to make a choice that impacts others is not easy and only a sociopath wouldn’t give a shit. Despite what many think on sites like this, often many leaders, especially in smaller companies like this that started as a passion project are not those types of people etc. They often don’t have the same personality traits you HAVE to have to climb a ladder at say, IBM or Dell etc.
That’s not to say it doesn’t suck for the people being laid off. And that you can’t have empathy and sympathy for both sides. It’s not a competition or a binary choice.
Oh boo hoo. They still get to go to work tomorrow. They still get a paycheck. They don’t have to go through the hassle of job seeking, interviewing, and the rejection letters. They don’t have to go home and wonder if they’ll make it through this time. They don’t have to see the worry in their spouse’s eyes, wondering if they will be able to pay the bills in the future.
And no, two weeks severance isn’t enough. It’s almost an insult really, as it can take that long to get interviews scheduled.
That’s missing the point entirely. The statement isn’t playing a victim card at all. It’s recogition that it’s a shitty position to put someone in.
Expressing empathy and sympathy for those that the decision affects and stating/iterating that it was not an easy choice isnt something I take as “woe is me” or playing the victim card.
The outcome and road ahead sucks for those affected no matter what. But sometimes all anyone can do is show some mercy and not be a dick with how they approach it.
Now, that said, it’s entirely situational and I don’t actually know the culture at plex as an employer (only as a customer). So this could totally be nothing more than lip service.
But understanding and differentiating the difference between lip service and sincerity does matter.
Empathy doesn’t pay the bills. I can’t call up the bank and say “hey I can’t pay the bill this month, but my ex-boss is really sorry about all this.”
Google and Friends gave people 6 months of severance. Thats enough time to get your life back on track. But two weeks is basically just “here have another single payslip to go away forever.”
Again not the point and no one said it did. But doing things with respect matters. And nothing lasts forever
Also 2 weeks is pretty standard, and isn’t terrible in an at will situation. Have you ever given a company 6 months notice?
Also if you are working full time at a company like Plex and living hand to mouth that’s not really on plex.
How are layoffs respectful? “Yeah we overspent or aren’t quite as profitable as we’d like, so we’ve determined that you’re redundant or unneeded or some other adjective that shouldn’t ever be used on a human, and so we’re going to have security perp walk you out of the office like you were caught stealing something, and we’ll have someone box up your shit and break some of it and mail it to you in 4-8 weeks. Please sign this paper that says you wont talk about what we did to you and we’ll toss a few bucks your way.”
I’ve even seen companies where people got informed they were laid off when they couldn’t log into their Slack account or whatever else. No other notice. Just dripping with respect.
I didn’t get laid off from Plex. I’ve been laid off from other companies, large and small, and had friends laid off while I was a “survivor”. My favorite time I was laid off was a few months after my wife had a baby, and a week after I told my boss she was pregnant again. That one extra paycheck sure helped me pay off the 2 month NICU stay for baby #1! I really felt respected by that company. Really liked it when the CEO sent out a form letter talking about how hard it was on him and how he lost a whole nights sleep figuring out who to screw over, instead of cutting costs in other areas.
Of course it’s not an easy decision. But don’t go all “woe is me” when you’re not the one actually suffering. Own the mistake. Promise to do better.
Expressing empathy and sympathy for those that the decision affects and stating/iterating that it was not an easy choice isnt something I take as “woe is me” or playing the victim card.
The outcome and road ahead sucks for those affected no matter what. But sometimes all anyone can do is show some mercy and not be a dick with how they approach it.
Now, that said, it’s entirely situational and I don’t actually know the culture at plex as an employer (only as a customer). So this could totally be nothing more than lip service.
But understanding and differentiating the difference between lip service and sincerity does matter.
Empathy and sympathy is talking about how awful it is for people to have to lose their job. Especially in this market. What they’re doing is talking about themselves and how difficult it was for THEM to make the decision. I don’t care about them. I care about those who lost their livelihood.
You’re right that it wouldn’t be an easy decision. It must be awful. But losing your job is still way worse.
Those at the top are the sociopaths lol.
So anyone that has grown within a company and into leadership or executive positions are sociopaths full stop?
That’s not really a healthy outlook to have tbh.
It’s not a black and white thing. it’s a probability thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5389508#
I’m aware of the theory. And even acknowledged it in my initial reply in this very chain….
Oh, ok. Alright then
When COVID started really popping off, management at my old job gathered all the technicians together in the shop. They read a bunch of names off a piece of paper while everyone stood around confused, then they said “If you heard your name, this is your last day with the company.” Absolutely heartless.
They then put out a canned public message about how hard the decision was, and how every employee is a member of the family.
Hopefully they leave the free features as is, and don’t starting going down the road many other companies have to squeeze out profit.
Hahaheheheh, aaahhhhh…
wipes eyes
Anyway, thanks for the morning chuckle.
Agreed, but I have a feeling I’ll be using Jellyfin in a few years.
Join us; It’s fantastic.
Please put some love on the appletv app for the love of god. I had sworn off plex totally based on the jellyfin community evangelists. VERY quickly switched back when I couldn’t even select which subtitle I wanted
I tried jellyfin for a short while but was so freaking annoyed by jellyfin users. Yes, I know you love your app but there are some large issues with it too, and I was shouted down repeatedly like I havent seen since Android v apple.
I experienced some of that gatekeeping too. “Oh I’m sorry, did you want a corporate streamer that let’s you change your subtitles get lost corpo”
Exactly. It’s not even for me but like, I have older family members who use it. I need it to be as easy for them to use as Plex is. Yes I know I can open the terminal and do x y and z, but they are going to just know “if I hit play it should play”.
I’ll give it another shot with this news, but yeah, was put off by them.
I mean yeah I would very happily move to Jellyfin. It just needs some time to cook. As of now it’s got quite a bit of work to do.
Try emby, much better than jellyfin for me. I had an issue that jellyfin wasn’t able to reproduce some of the series that I was watching, or it had severe issues. I had zero issues with emby.
I’ll give it a shot. I had written it off before for reasons I don’t remember off the top of my head.
edit: oh that’s right, it’s paid. I’ll stick with the free stuff
Sure thing. I had some issues with jellyfin transpiling some series, the Android TV app was unable to skip forward for example, and sometimes it stopped reproducing (WiFi issues, sure but they didn’t happen with emby). I only had to pay like 5€ total for the android app, and the server is completely free. I would switch to jellyfin if their streaming app / service were as good, but beiing the only one in the household that cares, having already paid the single payment to emby and being the one that has to fix issues on movie night while my partner is side eyeing me for changing shit again, I won’t bother for a good while
(^_^')
FOSS are not monolithic entities. Some individual with the knowledge, skills and free time has to be willing to work on those things. Most people who develop certain features in open source, do so because of a personal interest. If you don’t have the skills yourself, you can go find whoever maintains that app or someone willing to contribute and drop them a donation for their continued effort.
Monolithic tech giants accostumed people to pay for services with their private data and attention. As the past year has proven, this wasn’t a healthy arrangement and the comeuppance was way overdue. Contribute to the solution, don’t just complain about the problem.
If they’re trying to appease shareholders, then I feel like the enshittification is just starting. I’ve got Emby Premiere (webhooks were paywalled and are quite useful) and like that I have an off-ramp to Jellyfin if they start heading down a similar path.
Why are all these large tech companies failing this week? Is AI really decimating the internet on all fronts?
Not just this week but the past year or so
During covid many companies hired a ton of people due to the growth of many industries, particulalry consumer electronics and platforms like Plex and Netflix, and places like Amazon, Google, etc. Because many people were off work, there was greater demand. Obsiously infinite growth is not possible, and when things slowed down after covid, they moved to dump the employees they no longer needed
It doesnt necessarily have anything to do with AI; AI implementations are still extremely rough and moves to implement them at this point means providing an inferior experience. That said, some companies have been implementing AI, which will likely lead to worsening layoffs down the line
I don’t know if I’d call Plex a “large tech company” though
I would as they store massive amounts of data
What do you mean?
Yeah they had ~175 employees in January, and this layoff was like 37 people. A shame, but not large scale
It isn’t AI, it’s the economy. Companies that got money from investors regardless of their profitability now have to survive on their own profits which forces them to restructure
The problem isn’t AI, but interest rates.
Silicon Valley lived for a long time with an investor market that didn’t really have anything better to invest their money in, so they would invest in a series of Internet companies with the hope that one of them would make it rich. Now that lending money can make you more money, it isn’t worth it to invest in companies or ideas that don’t make money right now.
The VC funding that Silicon Valley relied on dried up. If you are a startup, you need to be profitable before you burn through your cash. If you aren’t a startup, you don’t have to worry as much about new tech cannibalizing your core businesses, so they are more willing to cut product lines.
Its not a tech issue, its a finance issue.
The tech industry has always been highly speculative. What we saw in the 2010s was only made possible through venture capital and high digital advertising budgets.
Now that there’s uncertainty and investments are expensive due to high interest rates, VC and advertisers are pulling back. As a result, we’re seeing a bunch of business models that have never been viable on their own have to try and support themselves for the first time.
It’s a greed issue. They are expecting 30% growth, and aren’t satisfied with that, so they are cutting jobs too.
Growth isn’t profit, if I lose $0.10 per widget and I grow my business from selling 1 million widgets per year to 1.1 million widgets per year I’m losing more money than I was before the growth.
It’s been going on for nearly a year now, but the layoffs tend to happen in waves because the stock market and investors in general tend to be very reactionary. Also a lot of companies released their quarterly earnings recently
investors / business / money people are stupid hogs who are blindly guessing and making the stingiest possible choices at any turn, they don’t know shit or do shit
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
lol you posted this 4 times. Lemmy.world was really buggy, I think I did the same a few times before moving instances
Money isn’t as cheap anymore as it used to be. Tech companies have been struggling for about a year now. Even the larger ones have to show profits these days (not defending them, just explaining as I’m working in tech as well)
deleted by creator
They’ve been failing for a while. It’s capitalism failing, not some magic tech entity concept like AI.
and it’s by design too
The current prime interest rate means it’s more expensive to borrow money right now, which means PE and VC are not throwing money at tech firms that aren’t traditionally profitable anymore. Plex likely runs at a steep loss and relies on private capital to stay afloat.
Plex has been crap for at least 5 years now. Switched to Emby a few years ago and couldn’t be happier.
Honestly have no idea why Plex still has such a huge fanbase. It’s so commercialized and gross.
Can I just ask, why not JellyFin?
People like myself who, perhaps, set up an Nvidia Shield as a Plex server can’t really use it. I don’t want my main PC running all the time to serve JF, and the Shield was a cheap and convenient way to serve Plex. If the Shield could serve JF, then that would be different, perhaps.
I suppose I should start planning for an alternative home media server at some point though. Never know…
Let me tell you that it’s worth it. You could probably start with a pi with some external storage for a while depending on how big your library is… but getting some metal to run proxmox over is very very nice (and unfortunately very addicting)
Hopefully that doesn’t mean we are going to see a slowdown in personal media features.
It will. As someone who only uses Plex, I’m sure the company will have to strive so hard after monetization that they’ll ruin the product and force us onto an open source alternative. I like Plex, but I don’t expect it to last after seeing all the other tech companies fail at this.
we already have seen a slowdown in core usability features in favour of chasing new customers.
Wasn’t Plex originally a fork of XBMC?
Yoy might be thinking of Kodi. Plays media just fine on a RasPi, bit of a different experience though!
Both are forks of XBMC.
Wow, it’s almost like those free channels the put all over my Plex that nobody wants was was a bad investment. Still love Plex as a service but I find it hard to see any value in FAST.
Try Jellyfin. Much better
I hated using Plex. They make you suffer unless you pay way too much for what the service is worth. Jellyfin has been a far more pleasant experience.
I don’t have anything bad to say of Plex as a company, and I wish them luck on their endeavor, but if they ever fall, I just hope they open source their software…
This a 1/1000 likely outcome. Bankrupted companies will typically sell assets including IP and software to other companies to pay creditors (which excludes open sourcing them). And well before bankruptcy, any financial issues will cause Plex to be modified to support shitty monetization to the point that you won’t want the source code amyway.
Sorry for the bad outlook, better that you be ready than to hope for a unicorn.
No, they couldn’t do that. They’d have to sell every asset to pay the employees or give their ceo a golden parachute or any number of things aside from actually open sourcing. Anyway, Jellyfin is open source and just needs to work to reach feature parity.
If they saw the writing on the wall they could open-source before they went into bankruptcy. However, that could open them up to lawsuits if it was deemed they were “destroying” their assets before they could be claimed by investors and/or creditors, but that’s a big legal gray area depending on what you can show in court. And venture capitalists have better lawyers than bankrupt companies typically do.
The shareholders would most likely call that theft
If Plex were to go down, how easy is it to transfer my setup to jellyfin?
You can try jellyfin alongside plex, just install it and point it to your media. Then you can see if it works for you
The only issue with Jellyfin for me is that it keeps transcoding my media. I just want direct stream it my client is capable but whyyyyy transcoding ittttt error for no reason.
Yeah It’s kinda hard to get used to
Are you using the app or a browser? I found that when I was using the browser it would transcode but when using the app it would be direct play.
It can definitely do direct stream since I use it on my setup. I’ll check out how when I got home.
it keeps transcoding my media
I’m pretty sure there is a setting (settings) to turn that off.
You need to use a native app on hardware that supports the format
Literally just did this on Saturday. It was easy to do and I’m not seeing any significant changes in resource utilization. I am enjoying being able to directly download media onto my phone with Infuse, however.
You can try jellyfin alongside plex, just install it and point it to your media. Then you can see if it works for you
The jellyfin community is probably best for that question.
