We recently set up a Plex server to host the school’s DVD-library on the local network and are testing this for possible roll-out in the entire county. It’s working great so far, except for a couple of issues.
We aren’t completely sure of the legality of allowing multiple users to view the same video simultaneously, even if it is only on our local network, and would be very interested in a feature that sets a limit on the number of simultaneous views allowed on all content or on a specific media library.
There are already a slew of requests for this feature, some going back well over a year or more. In fact I had a similar one on the old forums, at one time. This was for single accounts, and not a bunch of guest accounts.
Locking this down to the library and specific machines should be pretty straight forward, with a designated subnet, using Plex’s own settings for the network and restricting remote access. Opening it up for the county is going to be a bit rough. It could be doable, but it’s going to take a bit of money into hardware and infrastructure I think, to support the wide ranges of potential problems if you have 20 or 30 kids all watching at once remotely. All on different client apps, and maybe half transcoding to support their hardware or internet speed.
How many students do you have in the school? How many could be viewing at a time? What is the budget for the project? Who is the admin, a student or faculty member? Would you want the students to sync locally but watch off-line?
There are a bunch of other questions to ask here, but these are the start. PM sent with ideas for using locally only, remote would take a bit more thinking, to restrict it.
