What cost does Plex incur when I watch something from my friends server? They're not footing the bill for bandwidth that I can tell, so why is there going to be a cost associated with this beyond "we can"?
All of that has a cost. It costs money to maintain, it costs money to develop, it costs money to host.
It's a commercial product. They have been inching more towards monetizing their product for a long time. Being able to pay for a lifetime is a huge win imo. I wish more companies offered that.
Before folks get the wrong idea, this isn’t true. Plex uses universal plug and play to open ports in your firewall, unless you explicitly configure plex manually. At that point you still have an open port but you get to pick it.
That being said, the remote access functionality plex provides is very nice. The shocking bit but to me is that they are pricing remote play at 20$/yr. As far as I can tell you only use plex infrastructure when a direct connection can’t be made. I’m my experience that’s seldom.
That is, your host gets a DNS entry along the lines of 1.2.3.4.something.plex.com, where 1.2.3.4 is your Plex server's public IP, and they have a deal with a cert issuer so they can get valid certs for that hostname.
edit: It's Let's Encrypt these days[1], was sure it wasn't that when it started, but it's been a while.
[1]: https://support.plex.tv/articles/206225077-how-to-use-secure...
That almost made me switch to Jellyfin, but every time I look into Jellyfin I hear people saying it's not quite fully cooked, but that's been years now they've been saying that. So I stick with the devil I know.
Jellyfin+roku works great for me.
We all have bills to pay. Upping prices because I want more money isn’t a very understandable reason.
It’s not like we have any visibility into Plex’s costs. So it’s just as likely that the owner wants more profit than they have costs.
Things that were added in the last 10 years off the top of my head:
* 10 years of updates to the iOS/Android/GoogleTV/AppleTV/Mac/Windows/etc clients (that doesn't come for free)
* OpenSubtitle search built in
* Intro detection
* Credit detection
* Watch Together
* LiveTV/DVR support
* PlexAmp
* PlexDash
And more that I'm not thinking of.
You can say "I don't care about those features", which is a tired take IMHO, but there are plenty of features they have added to keep up with the online streaming platforms.
Agreed. The article says:
> Plex says that it needs to raise prices to keep up with rising costs, and that the added funds will ensure that Plex is able to keep developing new features.
and yet they also offer a lifetime pass. If I were considering paying a company that just did this, then I'm not sure I'd have much faith in the lifetime value of that lifetime pass.
"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and all of that but just wanted to provide an example.