Hello everyone,
So I have been evaluating the suitability of Plex for commercial use in streaming licensed content. My primary question is this, Is it legal to use Plex to commercially to stream licensed content?
generally not through the normal licensing which is for home/personal use.
you could use the plex billing contact to reach someone for commercial licensing.
OK thanks for the lead.
For clarification, Iād like to ask a few questions. The Plex Pass or Lifetime Subscription how does it work?
Does it place a limit on the number of servers I can simultaneously run under my account? If it does place a limit what is that limit?
Is there a limit on the number of users I can have in each server? Is there a maximum on the number of users that can be simultaneously signed in?
Iād suggest reviewing @ https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
and https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/frequently-asked-questions/
but as far as hard limits I donāt think there is a hard cap on number of servers or users, however I have no doubt they can keep an eye on extreme cases that may be considered abuse (ie dozens/hundreds of servers with dozens/hundreds of users).
you are definitely not allowed to sell or resell access to your servers like some people try to do on ebay etc (who eventually get shut down).
you may be able to negotiate some type of for profit commercial licensing if you have generated your own content (ie work teaching/training etc videos) or you can prove to plex you have properly licensed any content you have for redistribution etc.
Iām just a user, with no ties to plex so take all the above as such, I am certainly not the final word on the matter, that would be between you and plex and/or your lawyers to negotiate.
Right. Thank you very much for the pointers. My content are all Creative Commons license so I guess Iād have to work with Plex on ācommercialā use
So Iāve contacted Plex Billing team and they have reverted with the following
"ā¦ commercial use of Plex is not allowed and is against our terms of use: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/plex-terms-of-service/."
So I guess Iād have to commence my search for a media server solution that allows for commercial usage. Or Iād hazard a guess that someone might point me in the right directionā¦
Its my personal opinion that the point of that plex not allowing commercial use is that you plex pass or life time, give you access of the feature that if client cant connect directly to your server it will forward the traffic thru plex (company) servers. So you will abuse of that resources. And may be that you are making money of a license intended for a family and some friends.
I know for sure that there is a lot of servers that are being used for commercial use. There is even a plugin that tweets all releases and plays of the plex server, and those twitter accounts are very active (not sure why people just publish their personal dataā¦) There is a lot of media servers solution but I personally did not fully tested any of them, so I cant give an honest opinion.
Some info on them: List of streaming media systems - Wikipedia
Well interesting spin. I wasnāt even planning remote access to any of the media servers. All access to the content is planned to be local access (as Internet connectivity is a challenge where I plan to deploy them). Any fee charged is to cover the cost of powering the device as I they will be located at sites that are off the National power grid
if you donāt need any of the plexpass features and donāt plan to have external access, then I suppose there is not much to stop you from running an open unrestricted server, however doing so also prevents setting up users to restrict access and prevent anyone else from making admin changes to the server.
meaning anyone could just connect to the admin interface and add/remove/change the plex server settings.
you would probably also need to setup manual connections on the local clients depending on what devices you chose.
Itās the ability to create multiple users that I really need. And I believe that is a plex pass feature. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that with a plex pass, thereās a 15 user limit on the number of users that can be created on the server.
Then Plex might not be right for you. Plex is one ginormous PITA without internet or sporadic connectivity.
I dunno about that. I run my local server with almost NO Internet connection and it hasnāt been much of a monster yet. I intermittently connect the box to the Internet when I add new media fils and want to update the metadata of those files. Asides that my box is almost never on the Internet
āLegalā depends on your countries laws.
It is against our terms of service, which only allow for non-commercial use.
Users are not created on the server at all. They are not local
the 15 user limit is for the family/home managed users.
regular share users with their own individual plex account, you can invite as many as you want (up to the point where plex determines abuse).
in either case, the fact that users are not local but managed via plex web, is going to hamstring you.
you may want to look at other streaming solutions, which have more open user management.
I used āLegalā in reference to the violation of the ToS. Point taken.
The above two quotes clarifies everything for me then. I assumed that users were local to the server.
Any pointers?
Iāll simply say, google āplex vsā and see what autocomplete provides you. 
Lol! You really donāt want to be caught mentioning the competition. Hahaha
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shrug, in an age of the internet where many people like to bash people/products on their own forums, I try to keep it civilized and focusād to the forum at hand.
there are plenty of people and posts on this forums to various other products and how they compare in good and bad ways.
I already have lifetime accounts for the 2 main paid products, and the other is free anyway (kodi), plex is currently still my main goto cause it generally works as advertised, even if it is still far from perfect.
I try to have a little respect for each and keep the hate down where I can.
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