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.
I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.
Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.
Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.
Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.
I stopped using Plex shortly after they started forcing logging in with your online Plex account to connect to LAN only based server. The writing was on the wall all those years ago. Who wants to be locked out of their media when the internet is offline, completely defeated the point of self hosting local infrastructure
Jellyfin, while lacking a bit when I first migrated, has continued improved over the years and it has been joyful to use. Plus Jellyfin supported hardware transcoding before Plex did, which was a gripe I had with Plex at the time.
I stream from my server remotely and share with Family without hassle. I dunno where Plex is trying to go, glad I bailed long ago
They seem to be getting a lot of hate for this, but Plex is not FOSS… They have the roots but they currently have like 100 paid employees and are trying to make a business out of it. They have to do something to make money to pay people every month. My $75 10 years ago isn’t going to do much for that… The fact that they’ve made it this far without folding is impressive.
Yep, it’s something that more people need to consider to keep their free (as in the source code is not a prisoner) software going
It looks like jellyfin costs ~$500/MONTH just for their hosting fees: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
If everyone using jellyfin contributed $1/month, I bet that would be covered
(No, I’m not affiliated with them)
Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
I’ve been using Plex many years. I abandoned it about 1-2 years ago when they began their enshittification journey. Now I see they are continuing to double down on being assholes.
They do not need any more resources to allow people to use what already exists. Most people run their own servers, and, they track all that by the way. Hence why people moved away from it.
Don’t give them your money. Let them rot. They fucked their user base who built them.
If you don’t like the price there’s always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
Another company fucked by executives.
All these comments mentioning jellyfish and I haven’t see a single mention of emby. Is it considered bad or something? Because I switched over to it and I am liking it a lot better than plex so far
Seems reasonable. I’m a lifetime Plex pass holder, so it won’t affect me or the one person I let access my server lol
Yet.
I absolutely love that Emby is such a third thought that they don’t even get a mention anymore. They fucked their loyal users over so much that they don’t even get mentioned anymore. Can’t wait for plex to suffer the same fate
I gotta be honest, when I look at the problem pragmatically, it’ll be a lot easier to pay $20 a year than to switch to jellyfin and get all my users to figure out how to install clients and make it work for them.
I’m already at the point in my life where my primary concern is making things work smoothly, and if I need to throw money at something to make it work smoothly, the choice is a no brainer. (At least for some values of “money”)
As a plex pass lifetime user, this doesn’t change anything for me.
I am, however, blown away that the price went from $75 CDN to $350 CDN over the last 10 years!! That’s just insane!
Well this is a good reason to finish my migration to Jellyfin I think.
I only use remote streaming a couple times per year, so paying for plex pass just for that seems a bit silly. Their online-only account auth is also super annoying if the internet is down.
As someone looking to get into self hosting and was researching plex. What’s been the experience like using jellyfish with non techy people? This is mainly something I want to set up for my parents
As a techie I hate this answer but it’s hard to beat a Roku with Plex from an ease of use standpoint. My 70+ year old parents have no problem navigating it.
Yeah, this is the unfortunate truth. Jellyfin’s setup will never be as simple as Plex, purely because the simple setup requires a centralized server to coordinate things. And Jellyfin is built specifically to rebel against centralization. Plex is easy because the company has servers set up specifically to handle the remote access handshake.
Uh, my parents are over 80, and I have jellyfin set up on their firestick. They have no problem using it. It’s just an app they open like anything else.
Jellyfin is very versatile but a bit clunky. I have it set up for my parents on their Roku and it works well enough for them. I set it up for other family members on their WebOS TV but they don’t really use it. I used to use it with Roku as well, but had issues with some captions, Dolby Atmos and HDR. I finally broke down and got an Nvidia shield, which fixed all my problems since the developers focus on Android TV the most. I also have Plex, and it is easier to set up, looks more polished, but is less versatile.
Plex has pretty bad DV “support” as an example. AFAIK it will only play back dolby vision profiles that have the HDR10 compatibility mode or whatever. Any time I get an older DV file I have to play it through some Android TV app.
I don’t really have a problem with this. I paid for a lifetime quite a long time ago. Right now I only use Plex for plexamp and everything else is on jellyfin.
Is finamp at a point that it can replace plexamp yet?
