Important 2025 Plex Updates
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Personal Media and Beyond You’re going to be hearing a lot from us this year—we’ve got a ton of exciting...

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.

  • rekabis@programming.devEnglish
    2011·
    12 hours ago

    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.

    • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      11 hours ago

      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.

      Are you under the impression that Plex uploads the movie files to their servers and then transcodes them there, or something?

      And the hard work happens on your own hardware. All Plex’s servers are doing is acting as a signaling server, but no media or routed through Plex’s servers.

      • Kogasa@programming.devEnglish
        5·
        11 hours ago

        It depends on if you use the “relay” feature. If your server is accessible from the outside it shouldn’t be using this though.

        • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          But the blog post from Plex was specifically talking about charging for remotely accessing your own files. So your point is irrelevant to the discussion.

          • huskypenguin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 hour ago

            How is it irrelevant? Plex offers a bunch of services that cost them money that we don’t use, so they jacked up prices for streaming our own data.