They don’t even have the excuse

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.

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.

Hmm, it's been a while, maybe I'm misremembering. There were definitely some categories of Plex content not from my library that kept reappearing on the home page of my server, despite trying to get rid of them a few times. Maybe they weren't actually paid, I just assumed they'd only be pushing something if it was going to bring them more revenue.

The other thing that made me want to jump ship extremely fast was when they started sharing your recently watched items with other users, without asking.

If anything is to blame for that, it's the lack of momentum behind IPv6. We're out of IPv4, so NAT is inevitable, and IPv6 doesn't have enough inertia for single-stack to be viable (certainly wouldn't be described as "no drama" at least).

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.

Ah okay. When I used Plex it had hardware acceleration. But I'd been a Plex Pass lifetime pass user for years so forgot the distinction between that and non pass. Thanks