Does Plex value it's Lifetime Plex Pass users?

General Discussions
1

I think Plex has come to a tipping point.

I just want to be able to play my media across all my devices and share the same with my family and close friends. It sounds easy when you say it quickly, but I appreciate it isn’t. It’s a moving target; new media formats/capabilities, updates to device operating systems, new devices, etc.

So, as a consumer, I have a choice: pay for the ongoing service or support a community-run project or expect revenue to be generated some other way, e.g. through ad-support.

I opted to purchase a Lifetime Plex Pass. A great bargain for me, but not the ongoing revenue stream Plex Inc needs to keep the lights on. They must continue to sell Plex Passes. Does that mean they need to keep their existing userbase satisfied or entice new users with their existing or new offerings? Anyone that frequents this forum can judge which they believe to be true.

From my personal perspective, my user experience is worse now than when I first adopted Plex in 2013. I expect things to be fluid. Some Plex Pass releases will take a step backward – that’s a given with early adoption of features. However, the overall direction of travel should be to improve, a positive experience.

I don’t want games, premium music, streaming channels or anything else where Plex isn’t going to be best-in-class. Plex is (was?) the best solution for streaming personal media – nothing else and probably never will be.

I would love some new features, like decent audio book support as I think that fits into the original concept. However, I can live without that or anything else new. What I need and expect is for the core features of Plex to just work. No dancing, no work-arounds, no bugs that are ignored for 2+ years. Just let me and my friends and family (all of whom have zero technical capabilities) to enjoy my media.

If Emby or Jellyfin were better than Plex I would be off – spending a few more dollars isn’t the primary issue here. They are not quite there yet imho. I actually run Plex, Emby and Jellyfin and sync them via Trakt for all my users. They don’t know I do that. They don’t know anything other than Plex. However, I’m getting close to parting ways with Plex. It will be a simple job for me to just get friends and family all to install the new clients on their devices and they’ll be ready to go with all their watched statuses ready for them!

Here’s the dilemma. Like many others, I have a lifetime Plex Pass. Great for me, but no ongoing revenue stream for Plex. I feel ignored. I certainly don’t feel valued. Getting any level of support from Plex Inc. rather than the community is painful. I have a list of bugs, not enhancements or wishes, bugs. There’s no point in posting them. I haven’t for 2 years.

Plex Inc has no incentive to make me happy – the last revenue from me was in 2013. Ancient history. They can’t upsell me add-ons that are not best-of-breed and/or are not what I believe to be the core purpose of Plex.

So, where do we go from here Plex Inc? Can you conceive a business model that values existing users that also helps you grow? Can you be bothered to respond at all?

5 Likes
3

as a plex pass user myself, plex has forced me to start looking at emby due to them removing features i use (mainly the camera upload) and the fact you can’t really customise the front-end, doesn’t work properly with your already downloaded meta data and images (have loads of movies not showing any artwork on devices, even though it is there)

4

Well said @craigh

I don’t know about you but I am tired of seeing this type of reply here for one issue after the next

I’d like for things that were possible when I paid for my Plex Pass to be possible now

All that happens when I get an update now is features disappear that I like, some new features get introduced that I don’t care about…or I get bugs that disrupt things that were working before

There are weeks that I spend more time googling, searching here, rolling back updates, and changing things on my server than I do actually watching my media

There are long threads here about problems people are having that get zero attention, some of which I’ve wasted my time posting in…… and still have no solutions for

It appears as though they have adopted a new business model to introduce other streaming apps and paid VOD services inside Plex to increase revenue as craigh suggested. This is not a secret and anyone can Google the things that have been said by the CEO of Plex

I am also of the opinion that the longtime customers who are focused on their own media are falling into a category that is simply becoming unimportant

I’ve been told that this is not the case, but the evidence that I’ve seen over the last few months suggests I’m correct

I didn’t know what Jellyfin was a few months ago because I had no reason to look into it

But I know what it is now and obviously I’m not alone

Pay attention Plex

2 Likes
5

And here I thought I was one of the few that thought this way.

I paid for my plex pass lifetime subscription a while back because, at the time, plex was one of the few ways to get your media anywhere and everywhere. In retrospect, the lifetime subscription I paid for would seem to be loosing value.

Having synced audio playlists show up while offline is one of the biggest problems they still have not fixed. Accessing any of your synced media while “offline” {or without an internet connection} is going to ruin your day. Plus the requested additional features {like having audiobooks} would be nice, but not even commented on by developers. The problem I am seeing though is the addition of unrequested “features” that are difficult to turn off. How many times do you have to ‘redesign’ the homepage?

I will have to look into these alternatives of Emby and Jellyfin. Maybe they will emerge as better than plex because the plex developers are not listening to their end users.

1 Like
6

Yeah, one of the most voted feature suggestions is the ability to add books/comics to Plex. The request has been made in January 2013 (at least that thread, there were older posts before that category was made on the forum), it’s the second most voted feature requests and to this day Plex refuses to even reply to the matter.

@crashfly what’s your issue with accessing your synced media while being offline? It works fine for me on my iOS devices.

7

Like you pointed out it isn’t a viable business model with lifetime passes.
Now we have a situation where they are struggling for income and making dubious contracts like the 50M one they did recently which is a ad-fueled streaming service.

Slow but steady Plex is reducing customization and promoting streaming content and we know what majority of users use it for :

  • Getting rid of streaming services which have become scattered (we are up to what 10 now?)
  • Content lack of availability (region locks / timed exclusives).
  • Content quality
  • Freedom to watch what you want without having to worry it getting pulled or missing seasons (looking at you Netflix)

So promoting this streaming content to a user base that clearly doesn’t want it is just beyond stupid but makes for a decent sales pitch to sketchy investors I guess…

Home screen is now just a goddamn mess and clients are getting dumbed down on every mayor
release in the name of “optimizing user experience”.

Emby and Jellyfin have a good chance to prevent these kind of issues in the long run, they aren’t gonna replace Plex for majority of the user base soon but will get interesting once they catch up.

1 Like
8

I must class myself as lucky, LG OLED with Plex client and MacOS Server. There is very little I can complain about.

I feel for your situation, but this seems it will temporary as all devices would be unusable. What gets me going, everyone bags TV Clients, it works for me.

I hope you find a solution

1 Like
9

No reply from Plex Inc.

Q.E.D.

Let’s ask another related question to keep this alive…

How many feature requests have ever been implemented? What is the mean time for completion of highly requested features vs features no one asked for?

10

Plex values all it’s users, Plex Pass or not.

Yes, Plex is looking for additional revenue streams, just like any other company. It’s also been clearly stated that Plex Media Server and streaming your own content is still a key business for Plex and no plans to stop supporting this.

I don’t have a count of the number of feature requests that have been implemented recently, but there have been some. Sure some have not been. This could be due to lots of reasons. Some have technical limitations, some are not possible without significant work and/or changes to current architecture, some just can’t be done well.

The example of eBooks/comics or audiobooks mentioned earlier, one of the key limitations is a source for the metadata. Metadata is a key feature of Plex but there are very few (if any) good/legal sources of this info.

11

I do not know about anyone else but I do NOT need, or really want, metadata for my audiobooks. All I need is title and author and, in my case, both of those are in the file name so all I really need is decent display of file names.

The limitation I always run into with audiobooks in both Plex and Emby is playback and FF/RW and resume. If those behave correctly I could use one or the other of those to playback my audiobooks. But neither of those programs work reliably for audiobooks.

The other limitation is that most clients exit playback if a book is paused for too long.

My solution is that I never use Plex or Emby for audiobooks but instead I use MediaMonkey running on a small separate computer that is 100% outside the setup for my media that is used with Plex or Emby.

My setup works but I wish I could move the audiobooks inside my media management system so as to just use clients to play stuff back.

I have given up on either Plex or Emby fixing the audiobook playback issues but I do keep hoping.

12

for audiobooks we only need plex to store book progress, read the comment field in tags or txt file with the description of the book and a library icon to start with. it should be doable.

other than that plex implemented a lot of user requests! i use plex for 2-3 years and i find the progress in development immense! i absolutely love plex!

but there are some things i wish they would do.

better audiobook support, books/magazines, sort tv channels

1 Like
14

You can sort Live TV & DVR channels if you use XMLTV.

15

i can’t understand plex putting so much work into tv-dvr and i cant even sort the channels. this is a thing that (could) make people mad…

i have 88 tv and radio stations in it and the channel numbers they have are totally random, i need different sections for tv/radio as well…
the sd/hd classification is also completely random for me (my cable provider is not pickable, maybe thats why) it shows some radio stations as hd…

can i set this also with the XMLTV file?

1 Like
16

If you create your own EPG using XMLTV instead of using Plex EPG then the channel numbers will follow what you set them as. I use xTeVe to build my lineup but you might find another program more useful. You may be able to go from HDhomerun → xTeVe → Plex. Not sure what tuner you’re using but it’s an extra step I know… I totally agree we should be able to customise the guide directly in Plex.

17

Exactly they would rather add some fancy new feature or redesign the guide look and feel than sort the simple basics. Enabling channels to be ordered is a basic feature that appears in all other DVR’s I have used in the last 20 years. It’s only a look up table, but they can’t be bothered to set it up. Manual recordings is another one where you just set channel number and time to record. I have lost count of the number of guide issues this would at least given a simple work around when they crop up.

2 Likes
18

I’ve been using Plex unofficially for audiobooks for years. FF/RW and resume work perfectly for me. The only thing I need is tracking individual tracks so I can resume on the next file. Do you have links to your issue? I’d be glad to take a look.

19

What client? I have never found even one client that handles audiobooks even remotely well. If I have to use a computer to get things right then MediaMonkey does the job so much better and has about 1/5 the processor load. MediaMonkey on a computer also can run just fine on even a 15-20 year old under powered basic PC.

Also with MediaMonkey I can start a book or playlist (I usually use playlists in MediaMonkey) and then after an hour or so hit pause and go away for hours or even days and then come back and press play and the book plays just fine. That is it does not matter how long a book is paused it simply resumes when play is pressed. Is there any Plex client that does that?

Those are basic audiobook functions that I have been unable to find in any Plex server/client combo.

Also the last time I tested using Roku or Shield TV as a client I could not get it to FF or RW (other than dead slow which is no good for audiobooks that could be as much as 10-30 hours long and therefore could take an hour or more to get to the 2/3 mark.

But my MediaMonkey solution works now and I have little reason to change unless Plex or Emby or someone else creates a truly superior audiobook app.

But I do wish I could have the actual playback interface easily visible.

That quickly became longer than I intended. Sorry. I am, at this point very unlikely to use Plex or Emby for audioboooks because I need to have audiobook audio everywhere and have the ability to pause and play and skip from at least one spot in every room.

I do have more to say about my audiobook setup but it would not serve any real purpose. My setup works for me but it might not work for others.

1 Like
20

I used Web and Android mobile mostly. I created a music library and made sure to set the option to track play progress. I’ve organized my files using the same Artist/Album/Track structure, but for Author/Series/Books (with each book as their own track). For individual books it’s Author/Book/Chapter.

I’m able to play a book or chapter and resume where I left off if needed. I’ve even used Alexa to listen a book, although that has the limitation of not being able to resume.

21

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.