An ode to Plex. The end of an era

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I really hate what they’ve done to my boy. It’s been a great run though. Partly because the UI sucks. But also because I am watching yet another service I have used for years fall to the whims of myopic and greedy executives and shareholders while devs implement features and changes that I am guessing they cringe at.

I’ve seen it too many times across too many services to not know what’s coming.

Here’s a prediction of what’s to come…

The furor around the Roku UI will die down. Some people will leave, some won’t. Not enough will leave to offset overall numbers.

Execs will convince themselves it was a stunning success.

They will then move on to other platforms. Android, mobile, etc. Somewhere in there they will hit enough clients that a significant revolt will happen. And this will take down Plex.

Why? Because the people making the decisions are forgetting that it’s a bunch of home lab monkeys running home media servers that made the brand in the first place. It wasn’t people using Plex as a cable service for live and on-demand content and it wasn’t people piping in content from their other streaming services.

All of these things were convenient add-ons they glued on for the wife or kids or whoever happened to also be connecting to the local media sources.

Once you piss off enough media server owners, the reason that the vast majority of ad driven services are even used goes away when the media server owners move to Jellyfin, Kodi, or whatever service spins up from the devs that get pissed and leave Plex along with the media server owners.

How do I know this? Because after having Live TV, On-Demand, etc. enabled on my server for a long time, I finally went in and disabled them all. I, and my users, used to use these services along with local media for various convenient things. But, now that Plex is forcing ad-optimized UIs on us, I see no reason to be extra supportive.

I am already a Plex Pass subscriber. I am absolutely not going to incentivize these changes. Not only because they suck and make the user experience objectively worse but because doing so will just hasten the fall of the service as it drives users away.

So, farewell to Plex. Maybe not today. Maybe not for a while yet. But, eventually, the discomfort of leaving and the discomfort of staying will intersect and the exodus will happen.

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My 76 yr old mother is trying out Emby. She noticed right away how Emby and Plex both have horizontal top menus but after just a few days with Emby realized the vast customization she gets from Emby. Sure, it’s stuff that is under ADVANCED settings but she didn’t realize what she COULD have experienced with Plex had they actually fully implemented those same features too! She admits that she misses the left menu in Plex, which is also absent in Emby, but does say that Emby seems to be a bit more SNAPPY than Plex on her Roku. Plex made things far more needlessly complicated, hid and stripped many standard features and UI components from theirs and so Emby is where my household is now.

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Yah I am piloting Jellyfin. It’s got the left hand menu like Plex did, which is much much nicer when you have more than a couple libraries. I won’t know how snappy until I actually get it configured with them all.

It’s going to be a bit of a job to cut everything over. I have over 30 libraries that will have to be shifted and a lot of artwork and metadata customizations that will have to be configured.

But I have a feeling it will be worth the effort soon. My godson has been running it for a while. I had suggested Plex to him a year or so back when he was setting up his first media server but he opted to go with Jellyfin instead. Smart kid.

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Huh? Which Jellyfin client for Roku are you using which has a left-hand menu? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bagging on Roku. But both of their Roku clients use a top menu, with horizontal scrolling.

For the record, I use Jellyfin as a backup to my Plex server. So I’m not trying to discourage its use.

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Oh, I have only seen the web client so far. I assumed, which was a mistake for sure.

Doesn’t matter though. I meant what I said in my main post. I’d rather be on an app that hasn’t hit the stage Plex is at yet.

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Again, I wasn’t trying to change your mind. You’re commenting in a Roku thread and mentioned the left-hand menu, so I thought I’d missed something. I was genuinely curious if you’d discovered some client I had missed.

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Oh, I didn’t think you were trying to change my mind.

Just set up the Roku Jellyfin client and I already like it better, even though it doesn’t have the left hand menu.

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Half of the time I log in I cant even find my library. Only the slop they want me to stream from their servers.