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Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April (www.plex.tv)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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