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.
ITT: valid critiques of plex, understatements about how easy it is to set up and run Jellyfin for you and your friends/family, and a surprising number of people who don’t understand how plex works.
Glad I bought the Plex Pass like 13 years ago. While I understand everyone seems to think everything should be free, I’m sure your boss wishes you worked for free too, but the world doesn’t work that way.
I’m OK supporting products I use , and Plex is an example of this for me. It was a well spend $75 in 2013
What did you pay for exactly?
Your view unfortunately doesn’t show you how shitty the unpaid experience has become. XBMC used to be a good product. Since becoming Plex, now we have:
- no local hardware accel
- no HDR
- panels that look like local videos that trick you into switching to a paid app
- rearranged home screen after some updates
- no downloads on remote devices
- and now I’ll lose the ability to share streaming with my kid, who lives many cities away
If this were clear from the outset , no one would be upset. But pulling back features Plex at one time promised “forever” (remote streaming), is complete rug-pull bullshit.
You can enjoy that warm and fuzzy reverse-fomo feeling now, but you should know that they’ll start limiting your paid experience eventually.
OK, but why is it a for profit company in the first place?
And why does open source Software like xz, ffmpeg, etc still work without being for profit?
Fucking liberal.
Hot take here but not wrong
I fucking hope to god they don’t go full enshittification and decide to revoke the lifetime licenses.
Yeah, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal for most people here. They kept the price down as long as possible. I spent $119 just before the 'rona hit and I think it’s been well worth it.
Nah. Cool that you think that, though. The moment they started charging for what was a free service, they lost me. I have gigabit internet. The only reason i used their service to begin with was ease of use.
Hot take but maybe everything doesn’t need to be an infinitely expanding business. Just imagine for a second that it’s fine for something to just break even, pay for the few mainteners salaries and not expand the business at all ever. I know that I just uttered the cardinal evil under capitalism but fucking seriously. The primary userbase of plex is pirates. The whole incentive is not having to pay for a streaming service. Charging money for it is just torpedoing your entire userbase. The entire appeal of Plex was it not charging money.
Same here. I don’t like some of the recent decisions, but I remember the time I looked at the value and thought “yeah, this is working, valuable, and I can get behind it”, and bought the lifetime pass.
And I used the hell out of it! I don’t regret supporting the developers at all.
But features like plugins disappear, rolled to in-house teams. They work better, but cost more to maintain.
It’s ambitious, and gives developers plenty of work, but I feel the new redesign bit more than they can chew and overran budgets. They may be trying to balance budgets.
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They seem to be getting a lot of hate for this, but Plex is not FOSS… They have the roots but they currently have like 100 paid employees and are trying to make a business out of it. They have to do something to make money to pay people every month. My $75 10 years ago isn’t going to do much for that… The fact that they’ve made it this far without folding is impressive.
Why would you expect this to NOT be paid? It requires them to be running servers to stream the media through, I wouldn’t expect this to be a free feature.
I dislike Plex for several reasons, but asking for payment for stuff that costs them money is completely justified.
I’m surprised by the resistance to Jellyfin in this thread. If you are using Plex, you’re already savvy enough to use bittorrent and probably the *arrs. If you can configure that stuff, Jellyfin is absolutely something you can handle. If you like Docker, there’s good projects out there. If you’re like me and you don’t understand Docker, use Swizzin community edition. If you can install Ubuntu or Debian, and run the Swizzin script, you’re in business.
Huh, I was somewhat excited about the elimination of the playback limit for mobile apps (we are in 2025 ffs!) and then re-read that this will be only applicable for the subpar preview version once it is released… Which doesn’t fucking has the watch together feature lmao.
The only good news in a nutshell is that I am still a Plex Pass Lifetime User, so in a nutshell I don’t get good news lol.
And that’s why open source is best.
Well that’s the beginning of the end for them.
I’m about half-way off the platform already (and I’m a lifetime subscriber)
The only thing I go back for is Roku use (better app), PlexAmp (better app) and offline viewing. I don’t have to go off JF for those, but it’s a lot better on Plex.
But it’s not so much better than I can’t protest.
I’ve been using Plex many years. I abandoned it about 1-2 years ago when they began their enshittification journey. Now I see they are continuing to double down on being assholes.
They do not need any more resources to allow people to use what already exists. Most people run their own servers, and, they track all that by the way. Hence why people moved away from it.
Don’t give them your money. Let them rot. They fucked their user base who built them.
It looks like as long as the host has a Plex pass, this doesn’t change much. It is a regression of service, which sucks, but there are viable alternatives for those unable or unwilling to pay. And honestly, jellyfin is the clear winner in that case and always has been.
Now, if they start to charge my friends and family for access to my media after I have already paid them for their lifetime subscription, then I’ll grab a pitchfork with the crowd.
Also, why not run both and be ready? The resources required are minimal if you’re running via docker, just some extra RAM and a negligible amount of compute for overhead on library maintenance tasks.
Same. I’m not switching to Jellyfin yet either - mostly because of my boomer parents - but this is getting close to the tipping point for me
I run both on my unraid NAS. I use plex for streaming to my phone over cell data. I use jellyfin for streaming to my laptops and TV.
Plex tends to break every once and a while though. Not often, but it happens enough that I’m replacing it with just having my music on a DAP that is synced with Syncthing.
I also use the comic viewer function of jellyfin.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn’t want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
But this sounds like, since I’m already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.
I feel like it’s just a matter of time, until they pull the rug from under lifetime subs.
But in any case, this is probably it for me. I’m not completely happy with jellyfin performance on my server, but the price hike puts me outside of what i’m willing to spend for this service. I already host it myself, and i can tunnel it myself too, if i ever decide to run it outside of my home network
How to kill a service speedrun any%
Judging by the rest of the thread I’m going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:
I’m sure I’ll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just… wasn’t great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there’s a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.
Yes, it sucks that they’re removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there’s a significant chunk of users who don’t know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren’t going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.
I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it’s honestly paid for itself many times over, and I’ve been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn’t pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It’s a shame they’ve had to do it at all, but I don’t begrudge them for it.
remote streaming rarely works for me so I won’t be losing anything.
