Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff | Hacker News Reader

Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

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106 pointsmfiguiere125 comments

Plex can be amazing, but the core user community has absolutely no idea what the heck the Plex devs are doing these days. I've almost never seen such a disconnect between product development and key user community. /r/plex is basically full of posts complaining about long-standing requests, bugs, and broken features that are just simply ignore, followed by posts of "plex just released new feature literally nobody is asking for or wants, wtf?"

Most of the WTF feature releases are rolled back or deprecated within a few releases. So the community tends to be right on with what Plex should be doing. There's a lot of pigheadedness on the engineering side it looks like.

I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move. I think a better model would have been something like "pay $45, get every release in this major version, new major versions come out approximately every year" or with an alternate tier that would be "use plex, pay $35 per year, get all the updates". It would have smoothed out revenue and focused development on paying customer demands.

>I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move.

As someone with a lifetime PlexPass, I also think it's a terrible move. I'm starting to regret signing up with a company that allows that sort of purchase. It underlies all of the problems I have with Plex.

Lifetime membership sounds great, but it changes the nature of my relationship with Plex. If I pay a subscription I'm a customer; I use their services but I pay more in a subscription than I cost them, everyone is happy with the arrangement. But while I'm coasting off of my $79 Lifetime Plex Pass that I bought years ago I'm not a customer, I don't represent a revenue stream, I represent a growing cost.

I've paid for them to provide a service, but I've also incentivized them to change the service in a way that I use it less, because me using the service costs them money. That dynamic explains the problems I have with Plex. It explains why they're seemingly incapable (unwilling) to fix long standing bugs, and it explains the development of features that their base doesn't want (because Live TV, rental, and gaming represent new markets with new potential subscribers)

From my nieve point of view, I think, they made a mistake with the $100 lifetime fee (was that about a decade ago!). I paid that and have been using it since, and have never made another payment since.

It's commodity software. It's hard to justify a recurring subscription for something like this. It targets advanced users. If they can set up plex, they can set up alternatives too. And plex does not invest much in improving the core product. I don't remember it as being any better than it was 5-10 years ago. It still has rough edges. Skipping title/end credits is a nice feature though.

There have been huge improvements to the transcoder over the past couple of years. I think on-demand subtitles was also a relatively new feature which is huge over having to download them yourself and finding out the subtitle track sucked and having to delete that one and download a different one, and then woops that subtitle track was the same as the first, have to do it a third time.

Isn't the transcoder just ffmpeg ? From as far back as I can remember, plex does not work well over an internet link. It will play a stream, but as soon as you try to seek, skip, resume, etc. it throws its hands up. Given enough bandwidth and reasonable latency, you expect the experience to mirror youtube or netflix, but plex is not even close.

Plex uses a fork of ffmpeg that they iterate on and presumably cherry pick changes over from upstream ffmpeg, as well as add their own changes on top of. They also contribute back to upstream ffmpeg when they find a bug or optimization for ffmpeg. But working from their fork allows them to iterate at their own internal cadence.

> Given enough bandwidth and reasonable latency, you expect the experience to mirror youtube or netflix, but plex is not even close.

The funny thing about people is that they say things like this without considering that their own setups are to blame. YouTube is ran by servers outside of your control with content delivery mechanisms caching popular videos in a datacenter SSD near you. I run my Plex server on a relatively old Intel NUC in a docker container with the storage mounted over NFS from a 4 year old Synology NAS. I'm typing this message with another window open on my Plex server which I had skipping around a video with near instant playback when I move the play head (even outside of the reported buffered zones.)

The difference is LAN v/s internet. Doing anything on LAN is a solved problem for pretty much all software. The experience deteriorates severely once you access over the internet. I continue to use plex behind nginx on a rented server, but the experience is nothing to write home about.

There is some confusion about how accessing Plex outside your LAN works. There's direct server communication and then indirect through Plex's servers. You need to check your server configuration to determine which you're using, because a misconfiguration means you're accessing through one of Plex's relays which is going to be massively degraded performance. I still believe this to be a configuration issue, because things don't just magically get worse because you left your LAN. More information on that here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200931138-troubleshooting-r...

Your ISP's allowed upload speed also becomes a factor once you leave your LAN, and in America, most people's upload speeds are much slower.

The hardware of your server, the hardware of your client, the supported codecs of your client, your WAN upload speed, your client's download speed all become factors here. And another thing YouTube does is re-encode videos that are uploaded to commonly supported types to allow for quick and direct playback on client devices. Most people just take whatever movie they downloaded from ThePirateBay and act shocked when they need to transcode the video.

I rent a gigabit server and have a gigabit connection at home; the client is a shield tv that running android. Videos are h264 and audio is either AC3 or occasionally flac. In other words, all pretty bog standard stuff that doesn't even need transcoding except for bitrate, but my connection is fast enough to not need that. It's not a bandwidth, latency, or HW specs issue. The streams work fine when they work, even with blu ray remuxes at 20+GB per movie. There are just too many annoyances and it's mostly a software issue on the plex side. A lot of times, plex will just show a spinning wheel, not resume, and take really long to seek. I do run plex behind nginx, so it is still possible that there is some config issue, but I doubt it.

Check out the server remote access settings some time and make sure direct access is available, like I mentioned above. But I’m willing to just digress as we have apparently wildly different experiences.

The issue you mentioned is why I can’t use the Plex client for playback. I use Infuse which handles seeking fine so clearly it’s not an unsolvable problem. Crazy Plex hasn’t addressed it.

It’s stable and it performs well and it works on all my devices with hardly any fuss. It works better than the HBO app.

I’m not saying you’re wrong or your issues are invalid, but I do think it is stable and capable, and they’ve done a lot of work to make it easy to use. A glance at the logs and you’ll see everything it’s doing to make it go smoothly. And it’s much better at this than it used to be.

>If they can set up plex, they can set up alternatives too.

I resorted to Plex after I couldn't get anything else working acceptably. I need my powerful media server to push out content that my anemic clients can support. The Raspberry Pis prefer 720p, the Intel Compute Stick is limited by it's Wireless bandwidth, the PS4 is hobbled by Sony Entertainment's desire to sell me their media.

OH and even though I didn't set anything up I was able to watch my shows when I was camping at the Seminoe Reservoir, WY two weeks ago on my phone. A pleasant surprise after the mosquitoes chased me into my tent.

Skipping title and end credits should be configurable and automatic per show. This half measure is almost as bad as nothing at all. If I enjoyed having the remote in my hand constantly I’d have a cable subscription instead.

Agreed, having a bunch of lifetime customers without a source of recurring revenue also incentivizes telemetry, selling user data, etc. Jellyfin is also a strong enough competitor that many lifetime accounts would switch if new fees appear.

I'm afraid that unraid will run into similar problems eventually.

I use Plex every day and haven’t paid them anything. But I only use it as an app (relaxing xbmc and kodi) and don’t use any of their services.

I would probably pay $5-10 as a one time fee, but xbmc was an open source project so I’d never pay $100 or any recurring fee.

I just need a player for my local media. That’s not a recurring revenue source. That’s buy software once.

I'm a lifetime subscriber and if they chose to charge monthly I'd pay it. I've gotten a lot of value from Plex.

I’m a lifetime subscriber that recently moved which brought down my media server. It will probably be another 3 months until it’s back up…if Plex screwed their lifetime subscribers by trying to get more money out of us…I’d cancel my service and zealously criticize them for the duration of my previous subscription

Exactly. Even if the software is never updated with any new features or changes, it still requires constant maintenance to fix bugs, patch security vulnerabilities, support new hardware, and OS updates. It costs money to maintain software, and a lifetime license isn't going to pay for a lifetime of updates.

They wouldn't have got my $100 had they only gone subscription.

I loathe the subscription model.

While that sounds bad, I must admit Plex has been chasing “the wrong things” compared to what I want a Plex instance for.

I have streaming services for content I want to rent. I don’t need Plex for that.

I use Plex because it’s currently the best way to stream and organise content I own and have curated. But they’ve completed ignored that use-case for 5+ years now. It’s frustrating.

Jellyfin is still not quite there in the “it just works” department, but if it does, I have no doubt what’s going to replace my Plex instance.

Being open-source it will hopefully not pushed to weird commercial ventures and use-cases not actually wanted by its users.

Plex "just works" until it doesn't. The further away from the desktop you get the less reliable Plex becomes. In the browser it's flawless. On smartphone and tablet native apps I get maybe a one to five percent rate of not being able to see the server despite the fact I'm logged into it on the same device's browser. On embedded devices like smart TVs and streaming sticks Plex is a stinking pile of shit of an app. It's laggy, it crashes incessantly when you do something like skip forward after skipping back, and it constantly fails to see the server running on the same LAN as the device. This happens across android TV, Roku, Chromestick, and Firestick. It happens across different locations, routers, and ISPs. Plex is high on my list of "things I use because there isn't anything better but I still hope their developers stub their little toe every day of their lives".

Plex has the annoying habit of stalling indefinitely for me. I don't know what it's doing. I believe it's transcoding so that it can "burn" in the subtitles, but I have no clue.

I've mostly given up on it. I use sshfs and mpv when sitting at a desktop, which actually does work flawlessly.

I run Plex on an appletv with the server running on a synology. It’s ok. The subtitles don’t work unless I switch off and on for each show.

Anything over 1080p gets too laggy and it doesn’t buffer.

But I like enough to just download stuff in 720 and watch at that resolution.

Sounds like your Synology just isn’t up to it in terms of transcoding. Direct playback to an Apple TV Plex app is virtually flawless in my experience (exceptions were HDR content but that seems to be fine now)

I find that using the Plex native app on my TV works great, a near perfect success rate. Meanwhile chromecasting Plex to a TV works quite poorly and has frequent problems.

Plex never worked for me. The autotagging was frequently wrong, their version of libass has been years out of date FOR years (did they ever update it since the mid-00’s VLC version?), and it kept trying to lossily transcode videos that it couldn’t handle (such as WMV7) and failing hard when it didn’t. I’ve replaced it with VLC+SMB and am way happier.

Media ownership, whether we like it or not, is trending down. If media ownership is trending down then the number of potential Plex customers is trending down. It is imperative that they offer some sort of streaming on the side.

Agree completely on all counts.

I love open source. Jellyfin looks great, and Embey as well. But Plex "just works". I happily paid for a lifetime and would love to see more development. One of my most used services to watch home videos, listen to audiobooks, and stream my dvd collection.

The others all lack the apps, Plex is a native app on my TV, Playstation, Phone etc, and it just works. I always found the other solutions to have pretty clunky client options outside of PC browser

I primarily use Jellyfin through the app on my Roku stick. Works pretty great for me and my family.

I also have an old Android phone hooked up to old stereo system, and use the "Gelli" app for music playback. Also solid.

The jellyfin app pales in comparison on Roku. It lacks a lot of polish in the player, IMO

Disagree. It's got less shit, but it looks and feels better if you're goal is only media storage and playback

I disagree. One of the big things that bugs me is you can't see how far you are through something without pausing. Also, you enable subtitles by pressing... Down on the remote? There's no button for it. It's all just polish

Jellyfin native on fire stick and Android tv is far superior to Plex, given they started screwing up their apps to make people subscribe

Fun fact: Android TV is an android device, meaning when you pause a song Jellyfin and switch to another app, that song is still queued up in the background using the Android sound server.

Meaning: You can overlay "My Sharona" on top of any running Netflix video.

Interesting, I’ll have to check it out. There was a young guy making some really good progress on an Apple TV app but I‘be forgotten what it was called

I've been using Jellyfin on Android TV and it works just as well as Plex did!

I run both Plex and Jellyfin on my server. Plex is a little more polished but I don't see how they can sustain a business. Mainly use Plex but Jellyfin is not far behind and good enough if Plex goes belly up.

I guess, if folks Plex keeps bowing their heads to investors, and not really focus on the values which they started the company with, things may end up going south for them in the coming months.

Plex on my PC and Infusion on Apple TV is a flawless experience.

(This happened 2017~2018)

It's so interesting to hear this one, I interviewed with them because I had some random linked in notification, I use their product, I wanted to be a part of it and I worked on a similar proprietary platform with live tv. Loved that work.

From the job spec, I was maybe over qualified but it was Plex, it's sitting in my NAS, remote servers phone and tablets, purchased multiple time from their odd monetary system with iOS.

It's a great product I was happy to get behind. The interview process was non-existent. One person spoke to me high level, maybe 20 mins, I imagined an intro to the interview process, I was happy in my job to not worry, I wasn't looking, it was plex in a random linkedin email, after a week I get a call.

"Everything great, we are excited etc etc, when would be good to talk to some of our 'engineers' ?"

Organised for 15 days ahead as I knew there was a release coming (a release for who I worked for) earlier so wanted to be fresh.

12 days passed with no feedback. I email the whole CC of email to confirm.

No response. To this day. :)

Flaky. Amazing product but bad business choices. I really do feel bad for the employees in this case because if they're even half of me, they wanted to do some good work.

Edit: Clarity context - And grammar.

I would like to point out too, within those 5 years they could have changed. Hired better (seems not)

To be honest, it sounds like a contingency recruiter found you, made sure you were interested, and then pitched you to a hiring manager. The hiring manager maybe didn't want to deal with the recruiter for one reason or another. I get cold recruiter spam on a daily basis...

You might blame the recruiter instead of the company, in that case.

> You might blame the recruiter instead of the company

Ah you're right, I should have pointed out that the call was from someone else. It was someone 'internal' this time.

But yes you're absolutely right and this isn't a dig at recruiters, they're usually harder working than me.

So just to clarify, if someone is even half as good as you, they’re still pretty damn good?

Maybe it depends on which half.

It's going to be extremely annoying if Plex goes out of business.

Jellyfin is a good alternative

Does it perchance have a plugin for replacing Plex's "search various streaming services at once" feature?

I haven’t seen a plugin with that functionality so I doubt it exists.

Not sure, I don't have this use case.

Does Jellyfin have user friendly clients for iOS, Android, Roku, AppleTV and various SmartTVs?

iOS

Yes: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellyfin-mobile/id1480192618

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swiftfin/id1604098728

Android

Yes: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jellyfin.m...

Roku

Yes: https://channelstore.roku.com/en-gb/details/cc5e559d08d9ec87...

AppleTV

Yes: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swiftfin/id1604098728

various SmartTVs

Depends. The Android ones, yes. There's one for Samsung but it isn't officially packaged yet - works quite well from what I've seen tho.

LG has a good one

Every time I've asked them about an app for Samsung or LG tvs - the two most popular brands they've pushed back "we're volunteers, we don't use those TVs, it's not on our to-do list but feel free to code it yourself". They aren't open to being paid to develop it either.

Interesting, I have a Samsung TV but I'v never even considered running Jellyfin as a native app. I keep the TV off the internet so it can't be a spy box. The Chromecast with Google TV is so affordable and so great, I just use that everywhere. To be clear I'm not telling you you're wrong for wanting to do it on the TV, that's a personal preference, I'm just sharing how I do it in case it helps.

I ultimately ended up getting an nvidia shield, but at that point it solved my biggest gripe with plex so I just switched back to plex and have been happy with it.

Are you not concerned about the Chromecast being a spybox?

But you’re not concerned about ChromeCast - sold by an adTech company - being spyware?

A Roku is what? $50? Cheaper than a new tv and probably a better experience than lgos or tizen…

Do you use paid features of Plex and if yes, which ones? Im using Plex daily to stream shows stored on a SSD connected to Windows laptop. I think I would not miss on any paid features they provide. Initially when I decided to try to watch less mindless tv stuff, I thought there will be a plethora of solutions for home streaming but it turned out that the only one that actually works is Plex

emby and jellyfin work just great

and jellyfin is free & OSS

Jellyfin is nice. It doesn't work great though. I've had and have way too many issues with it.

I run it next to Plex to keep an eye on how it develops. I still have issues with pretty much all clients, from losing server connection information, to jankiness on changing users, or subtitles just not rendering properly, crazy high CPU usage for certain transcodes, etc.

Plex just works most of the time. Clients are better (even though the thing about them pushing crappy streaming and live tv stuff bothers me a little), subtitles mostly just work, rendering is ok and most video formats work well on most clients, and so on.

I want to like Jellyfin. I have high hopes that one day it will be great and I won't want Plex anymore. That day is not here yet.

> crazy high CPU usage for certain transcodes

The reason I stopped using it for hosting my collection on a PI.

Overall decided its just easier to have a public NAS accessible from anywhere.

No point to open stuff in a browser when you can simply open a video from another side of the world like a regular local video on my laptop.

So much better an easier.

I do both - have it on my NAS exposed as SMB shares but also Jellyfin both on the internet without vpn/tailscale and of course with.

Sometimes I want to use a local media player, sometimes, when I am unsure what to watch I browse the media gallery and just watch from the browser.

I don't trust Plex. I don't like its media server, all of the dark patterns, the subscription, unknown telemetry (although firewalled.) I liked that it was available as an app on my TV but I solved that a different way.

The only premium feature I'm using is hardware encoding personally.

hardware en/decoding for sure. im not sure if it is still the case, but prior to pruchasing the liftime account playing back media remotely from a phone/tablet was limited to 10 minutes. i have 3 kids, and we regularly take long drives. 10 mins would not cut it. i also share my content with family, which again i think is harder without a subscription.

Downloading onto devices is my only real feature

Sure there are other ways to do it, but Plex just makes it easy, so I paid

Skip intro feature is only available on paid version and works really well.

Plexamp and Wireguard have revolutionized music in my car.

Plex has a tough business model. It’s hard to make money from the pirates.

Pirates spend tons of money on legit content. Movies https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/06/piracy-fi... music https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu... and books https://bookriot.com/book-pirates/

A lot of "pirates" don't pirate movies and music because they don't want to pay for them, they do it because they want to own them and want an actually good and respectful user experience.

The biggest Plex users I know don't really pirate anyway. They mainly buy DVDs/Blu-Rays and rip them for use on Plex.

It’s easy if you’re selling them hardware. Even pirates are fine with paying for something you can actually touch.

I pirate because a lot of content is not available in my country. I pay for all the services that are available to me. Plex serves me well for the ones I can't buy and I bought a lifetime subscription last year. If they asked for money for future updates I'd probably pay if the amount was reasonable.

I don't know the percentage, but an enormous number of Plex users aren't pirates.

What else do people even use Plex for?

Maybe Linux ISOs encoded as lossy video.

I heard there's a hidden message from Linus if you play Jaunty Jackalope backwards.

My Plex server hosts rips of my (quite large) DVD/Blu-ray/UHD Blu-ray movie and digital/CD music collections.

Buying DVDs/Blu-Rays, ripping them, and then getting a personal Netflix-like experience instead of the horrible DVD/Blu-Ray player experience.

Isn't that just expensive piracy?

How is it piracy if you bought the movie?

Because you're not allowed to break the encryption to copy it to hdd.

I am in my jurisdiction. [0]

You might not be in yours, but that doesn't make me a pirate.

[0] https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...

That looks similar to how it is in the US. But here it's not the copying that's disallowed, it's the breaking of the encryption to enable you to get a useful copy. So unencrypted but copyrighted material can be copied, but encrypted copyrighted material cannot. And blu-rays are all encrypted.

Illegally breaking the encryption in order to do legal things with the video does not make you a pirate.

I had it running as a DIY TiVo. But since I canceled cable it's mostly an unused interface for a copy of infocon.org on my NAS and rips of a few dozen DVDs I own.

I probably gave them more money with the lifetime deal than if I paid monthly for the period I used it heavily.

I connect Plex to my TV tuner so I can watch local NFL games from anywhere.

emby is a great alternative that allows more control with easy local accounts and no ad supported content

jellyfin is also great but lacks apps on some devices and is a 100% free OSS alternative

I have been a paying supporter of Emby for a while now, and I feel like I bet on the wrong horse. Development is quite slow. It feels like only a skeleton crew is working on it compared to Jellyfin.

Neither Emby or Plex are perfect, but Plex seems to handle transcoding better. Emby still has the advantage over Jellyfin of a native Samsung Tizen app, even though Samsung TVs are slow as shit and it's a horrible experience.

well jellyfin is OSS so if the community is large its going to be hard to match that internally.

i went with emby because it has better app support and i know eventually jellyfin will catch up and surpass it at which point it'll be real easy to just switch over. plex was a non starter because they make local accounts hard to use to better push their ad supported crap on users.

ie your parents create a plex account to use your server the defaults will mean they see all that ad supported plex content until you walk them through removing it

I pretty much have to be on-site for any family member to get them on Emby/Plex anyway.

yea - I have a fair number of friends and family who have access to my server. they're gonna be super bummed if it turns off

I just renewed my year.

IMO they should have focused on building paid addons. Their life-time license thing is well worth it, but it's bad for building a sustainable business around. Hell, I'd pay extra for a nice mobile music client. I'd pay extra for a better Python API. I'd pay extra for access to high-quality metadata, etc.

Plexamp is my default music app. It's great!

They have a nice mobile music client

yeah, they should've charged money for it lol

I don't get all the comments of people saying that JellyFin doesn't "just work".

I replaced Plex with it a year or so ago and it has just worked since then, without any issue or any particular setup required.

For me Jellyfin server just works and is great.

But the Apple TV experience is not really great with the official (still work in progress) or the one that is often recommended but I can't remember the name for at the moment.

As great as the server is, I feel like the apps are where Plex has Jellyfin beat.

That’s why I choose to use Infuse as my Apple TV client. Plus it does local transcoding, taking that load off your server.

I have tried Infuse but it seems to have issues with large libraries.

Often not updating when I add something or just missing half my library.

Different people have different usage of features, where some features are worse or non-existent on Jellyfin.

You’d be correct to argue that just because something is arguably better in some ways does not mean that it’s alternative doesn’t work. But people are not good at expressing themselves.

I need to give Jellyfin a fair shake again. One thing I like about Plex is watching content off of my server, and then without logging out, switching to watching content on a friend’s server, on client devices like my smart TV.

Try comparing the Jellyfin and Plex apps on Xbox, i'd like to switch to only running Jellyfin but the 3rd party device support isn't good enough. Hopefully it'll improve

Anecdotes is not data, though. For me Plex “just works” but I’m careful not to dismiss the many comments I’m reading here about people that do have problems.

I used Plex briefly right after it came out from the roots of XBMC. The reason was, at that time, if you wanted to play something off a computer on your TV, better have a long DVI cable and a headphone-to-RCA cable and hookup your laptop and screen mirror, or better set up a PC sitting next to your TV and have a media server running. That option felt cool and useful so I did that, between like 2009 and 2012 ish.

Now? I stream most of my content, but if I am torrenting something, I pop the file in a folder on my NAS and my smart TV can see that drive on my home network. I don't need fancy thumbnails. I don't need any fancy sorting. I typically don't need transcoding. I just navigate the folders using my TV's built in browser and hit play, and it works. And it has worked that way for years....

I think I am in the place where most home users are now. Most people, even technologically-adverse people, know that they can put some media on a USB stick and plug it in their smart TV and that is simpler than setting up media servers for home media content. And streaming services have taken away the need for a lot of people to have local content.

So who is left? People who hoarde local media and want instant access to it in their home theatres, who have vast libraries and want advanced sorting, playlisting, and multi-device streaming? How many people can that possibly be, and how would those people be supporting Plex financially?

Never occurred to me that people would use Plex for local media.

Afaik its main use is for seedboxes. Torrenting on a server. You set up Plex and Prowlarr, then you have your own streaming service with all of the content on streaming services put together plus everything out on dvd, bluray, etc.

I don't think Plex would be getting much financial support from them, not because they're not willing to pay* but because having purchased the lifetime licence seems to be fairly widespread from what ive seen.

*Check out plans on seedbox providers. Most are more expensive than streaming services. Then you've got people who dont want to/can't manage the above paying for access to remote Plex libraries, much like they would a streaming service. There's plenty of people pirating for the better experience who are willing to pay a premium for it.

> more expensive than streaming services.

more expensive than _one_ streaming service, or more expensive than a cable-tv-esque "package" of multiple streaming services?

Some get in to the hundreds of dollars a month. I have no insight in to how popular they are.

I just paid the $150 lifetime membership the last few months, and I'm not the only one. Most folks in this boat are trying to support sharing and managing a media collection with more people than just ourselves. For me, it's my wife and some family friends. And with Plex, I can share my whole library, or just parts, with them and they can watch easily on their TV. No big downloads on their end, no navigating a file tree, just a slick app like all the other streaming apps.

Add in the *Arr apps and Overseer for slick request management and youve got a great system that's easy enough for my accountant brother and my non-technical wife to use without any hiccups.

Banked on free, ad-supported content, then the ad market stumbled.

I don’t know the solution for Plex. I haven’t agreed with all its decisions, but I use the product every day and get enormous value from my lifetime subscription. What would induce me to pay monthly? I am not sure, but it wouldn’t take much. Pitch me, plex.

i JUST bought a lifetime pass two days ago... i'm really not pleased to read this news

Until this news, I honestly thought Plex was an open-source project ran by 1 or 2 people.

What's their actual business model to support presumably ~100 person staff? That's not a huge amount of money but not peanuts either.

What gave you the impression that it's open source?

Plex really just needs to host instances of their servers at something reasonable that I can upload easily to. Add a torrent client for good measure. Just make stream boxes.

Plex is explicitly trying to move away from being associated with piracy, so that won’t ever happen.

But what you’re looking for already exists - search for “seedbox” on Reddit.

Apps are the main driver. If there isnt a very strong client ecosystem it will always be niche. I run jellyfin side by side just waiting for a good tvos client

I've been really happy with Infuse as a jellyfin client (ios, tvos, macos).

Can jellyfin reverse engineer the server so it works with plex client?

We have no interest in doing that.

We do however have a tvOS client in development.

I thought this was the ERP company

https://www.plex.com/

And I thought that ERP stood for erotic roleplay

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