Has Plex forgotten that Plex is for people that wanted to “cut the cord” and not be tied down by cable companies (and now streaming services)? Has Plex (and maybe even some of us users) forgotten the huge benefits of a personal media server and personal media collection? Here a just a few of the benefits:
NO ADS, commercials or interruptions when watching your own curated content! This has always been a huge problem that Plex as a company solved, but when they started adding “Live TV” and “Movies & TV Shows w/ads” that is in direct opposition to the very idea of what it means to have a personal media server.
YOU control the quality of the media you consume and can choose which devices you want to play it on (unlike iTunes or other digital providers).
It’s yours forever (until your hard drive dies so always have a backup) and streaming companies cannot alter your content, remove scenes from your movies and shows or alter lyrics because they aren’t “politically correct”.
With those 3 key points, why does it seem Plex has lost it’s identity and began offering updates and services that are in direct opposition to what it means to have a personal media server? I can even see how features like watch together and the social features they recently implemented can be beneficial for family members and friends (although I don’t use them much) but a huge amount of Plex updates and resources lately are geared towards “Live TV” and “ad supported Movies/TV Shows” instead of adding useful features for Audio/Video playback that will benefit users with personal media servers.
I began using Plex when I discovered Plex/Eight or Plex/Nine around 2009 (I was about 17-18 years old) and have been a lifetime Plex Pass holder for quite a long time. My hope for 2024 is that Plex double down on what made it popular and great all those years ago, and offer great features and updates that make having a personal media server fun and enjoyable. Make sure your media player is up to date and runs well, make sure you are supporting modern audio/video codecs and obtain the proper licenses for TrueHD Atmos from Dolby and that your users who have spent years curating a personal media collection, can actually PLAY the content properly.
@elan PlexAMP is truly a phenomenal app and I can’t say enough great things about it! However I (and surely many others with personal media servers) would also like to see that same level of care and detail when we play our Movies/TV shows on something like Plex for Apple TV (which has had audio and video bugs that prevent smooth playback for going on 4 years now).
So Plex, don’t forget what actually made your company popular and what made Plex a great company in the beginning! Streaming services come and go all the time, but those with a passion for personal media will always be willing to support the companies that support us.
If the ad-supported streaming content keeps the lights on at Plex I have no problem with them putting work into that even though it cuts in to personal media server features.
I certainly agree that problems with core media server functionality like proper playback should be a high priority at all times. For what it is worth, in the recent Plex “fireside chat” thread, the Plex staff agreed and indicated that unifying and stabilizing the client experience was on their to-do list.
We should all continue making detailed bug reports and feature requests so they know what’s on our mind.
I agree to an extent. However If the ad supported content was keeping the lights on, I don’t think they would have fired a bunch of staff recently in order to become profitable. And how much money in Plex pass subscriptions do you think they lose by having a poor quality media player experience on popular platforms like Apple TV Roku etc? Just look at the users they lose to Emby, Jellyfin, Infuse and Kodi. They only lose those users because the core experience is buggy, media playback is buggy and recently the social media features.
I hope this is top priority. Currently no platform for Plex has a premium quality media player. Shield TV Pro and Plex HTPC are the only players that are kind of powerful, but even those have issues with playback of certain files.
Plex was profitable before the ad supported movies & tv or any of the “content from Plex” features. Plex wouldn’t even be popular if it wasn’t for personal media server users and I think they forget that.
A lot of times companies think they have to reinvent the wheel to be successful and thats just not true. Companies just have to stick to what they offer and make that product work extremely well. If you can’t deliver on that simple principle then no amount of ad supported content or social media features will make your company sustainable.
Well, without the streaming service revenue, perhaps it would have been even worse.
I think we (and most users here) agree in principle that personal media support is the most important thing to us. We’ll just never be able to do more than speculate about how the company should be run since we don’t have inside data.
IMHO, streaming kind of fits thematically if we look at Plex as an entertainment hub. I don’t use the streaming channels, but clearly many people do – we see frequent reports of small issues which are apparently fixed quickly by the upstream partner. I suspect that maintaining the streaming product does not cost Plex much manpower. But again, who really knows.
I fully agree that making all the clients as rock solid as possible is the best thing they could do for us and it would have to be good for the company, too.
I would love to see some “Certified for Plex” program identifying boxes that can play anything.
Not sure what this has to do with plex. If you want to play your files unchanged in terms of quality, you’ll have to be selective about the devices/operating systems you run as clients.
Again, what does this in particular have to do with Plex? Plex doesn’t censor your personal media content, nor does it swap the files with censored versions or anything of the sort.
Yeah I know that, my point is that Plex was supposed to be the antidote to the ads and commercials and cable model. Instead they’ve chosen to join up with that same model and make you have to disable all the features yourself.
Even having the option for files to be playable on pretty much any other device is a problem that Plex as a company initially solved. Other companies tied DRM around everything making that pretty much impossible until Plex came along (and now emby Jellyfin etc).
Exactly! This is another huge issue that Plex solved and has everything to do with Plex. The alternative is that streaming companies and other digital providers can censor your purchased content, swap files and change version or even completely remove your purchases (as Amazon and Sony have done recently). Plex has always been the antidote to this business model. So to me adding “ad supported Movies & TV” or “Live TV” is in opposition to what it actually means to use Plex, and to keep focusing on ad supported content and making sure that is priority only makes Plex part of the problem and not the solution.
People that use Plex do so because they want to escape the cable and streaming model and “cut the chord”. We don’t come to Plex for “ad supported movies & TV” because the whole point of a personal media server is that you don’t need that!
Well, having your personal media server with you own media is a good thing and you listed a few of the reasons why.
But getting new media for use with your personal media server may involve costs. Maybe your use case involves quick consume of movies as well as simultaneously owning your curated content. Plex’ offer that you don’t have to change platforms while _choosing which movie / TV show you want to watch (you still need to change platforms to actually watch it), is a good addition to that and I cannot see why it should be all disabled by default.
While I agree that playback could get a lot more love by Plex, and while I don’t use any of the streaming or socializing add-ons, I understand why this is not the wrong path - even if your use case (and that of many others like me) does not make use of any of these features. As long as it does not cancel the “local media, too” feature and does not force me into not being able to differentiate between my own content from streaming or DVR stuff any longer - I am fine with any of the features that I don’t use. I don’t just want to be bullied to use them.
That being said, I clearly see a couple of fields where Plex could do better to serve users of the product they once were and I agree that I don’t observe enough effort to stay the best possible solution for these users.
Yeah some cost for sure as with anything but buying physical media for instance and ripping to your Plex server can be relatively cheap as well. And it’s also possible to legally obtain streaming exclusive content via PlayOn and have them DVR shows unavailable on physical media for relatively cheap. And of course people can just download from the internet, then no cost are involved in that case.
I think it’s the wrong path for a few reasons. They are never going to compete with social media networks or the big streaming giants who have billions in revenue behind them. Really I don’t see why they would want to (or waste company resources and time to do it). Plex has always been positioned as the alternative to streaming services and cable networks. To try and become another streaming service instead of focusing on the alternative solution the company was built upon and offers, is a wasted opportunity that newer companies like Emby, Jellyfin and Infuse are capitalizing on. If you visit the Emby, Jellyfin and Infuse community forums they are full of users who migrated from Plex because they feel Plex no longer focuses on personal media. They are losing a lot of revenue because they are failing to provide a stable core service in favor of services most users do not want.
I 100% agree with this! First they have to get the core media player capable of actually playing anything LOL but most definitely they should have something like this.
I’d be happy to pay monthly/yearly again if they’d focus on their core product instead of all this other BS meant to generate revenue through data collection.
Agreed. And as far as stable, powerful media players go, I think it would be great if they could integrate VLC. It’s what I end up coming back to for my personal content. Plus it has streaming capabilities (which I haven’t quite explored, tbh) and best of all, it’s FREEWARE.
So with the new “rental” store, how does this benefit a personal media server company? And how is this good for people who run a personal media server? Genuinely curious how this is beneficial and who will use this.
I don’t think I’ve rented a single movie or tv show in over a decade since I started using Plex, and the rental market of not having continued access is why people chose to go to Plex in the first place!
I would much rather see a download store for buying vs renting. And allow those who buy the option to download and add to the server manually like you would a blu-ray disk rip. Now THAT is what would be awesome for a personal media server user. More legal ways to obtain media. But renting? I don’t think that is of interest to the vast majority of people who use Plex. And if they have a Plex server they likely already have a copy of the movie you are offering to rent. So not sure about this move…
“Personal Media Server” is a pretty niche product, I would say. Branching off into providing their own digital content (not only to put the media companies at bay to prevent the “you aid and abet piracy!” complaints) can be an income generator. Since their clients already serve up streaming video, it seems a simply branch off to providing the videos themselves, for a cost (ads), or allowing rentals. It sucks for those of us that use this service primarily for our own content, but as long as it doesn’t detract from our side, I don’t much care what they do on the other side.
The problem is that it appears that this all IS detracting from the server-side of things. Not only the recent history email fiasco, but complaints about client stability seem to be ticking upwards here. Few changes made to the server-side of things either means they are running out of ideas, or are dedicating all resources to their streaming options, leading to a stagnation of features relevant to us.
I agree with the sentiments made throughout this thread. I used Plex on and off again through my college years (depending on how dependent I was on ramen haha). The thing I used it for was my own personal media collection. Yeah, I had to pay to get the features I wanted but the focus was targeted tightly around the core experience I paid for. Plex had its issues back then but they demonstrated its media server audience was its audience.
Now I spend more time troubleshooting Plex going off the rails than I ever have and its getting worse, not better. Issues with transcoding, issues with tonemapping, choppy playback, buffering when the bandwidth is far in excess of what is needed, slow load times, buggy interface that has to be forced closed every now and again etc etc. Sharing access with my family has been a nightmare of constantly troubleshooting the next Plex problem. Meanwhile, on the same machine running in a different Docker container, Jellyfin rarely, if ever has issues with playback. It’s free and the open source nature of the software means that it is ran by people who do this not for profit but because they actually are passionate about media servers serving media to countless clients.
Today, loading up the Plex website I see this bright and center. What isn’t mentioned here? Media servers. You don’t see anything related to self hosting your own media until nearly at the bottom of the page (or at the end of the list of tabs below this screenshot, almost invisible).
I don’t expect anything to change or get better. Plex had massive influxes in cash from investors dreaming of ad revenue Plex Pass alone can’t provide and something Plex has always struggled with is Customer Support and handling feedback from its users. Even more concerning is the new rumored interface likely to make ads and rentals even more prominent. Yeah, I can turn that stuff off for now but my fairly tech illiterate family has expressed great confusion on what is my content and what is Plex’s streaming content. I can’t disable it for them from a central location and they have to go through hoops and a step by step from me. It’s a complete and utter mess to administer Plex as a service and that is the reason I have begun migrating over to Jellyfin. Once I get my instance of Authentik up and running in the coming month or two I will be sunsetting my Plex support for family.
(edit) Something else I forgot to mention. I am rather not a fan of LTT for a myriad of reasons but I thought his video a year ago on Jellyfin/Plex was well done. He called for Plex to improve. Plex did not. In fact they made few to no moves to improve and the performance regressed by several metrics. You would think a rather public callout would at least call for some small fixes to the major, long standing issues of the main server experience? Nope.
I’m afraid PLEX has completely lost me with their latest updates.
I don’t care about streaming online, but it’s fine for those that want it. No, their latest thing is to start removing agents and plugins that I rely on for my personal media.
Not only does it take 5+ minutes to match anything with plugin agents on anything later than 1.31.3.6868, in the latest 1.40 they’ve removed OpenSubtitles support… and also made it so that anyone who upgrades can’t go back to the last version that worked properly.
That’s the final straw for me. I guess I’m stuck on 1.31.3 forever more. Waste of time & money buying a lifetime pass.
For those wanting none of the stuff Plex has been releasing lately, you can always go back to pre v1.0 code. It didn’t have much of the stuff you don’t like and worked pretty well, so long as you were using h.264, aac/ac3/dts.
Well I guess if it works without constant troubleshooting < v1.0 may actually be an improvement… I get it, some people love Plex and have loyalty to the company and software. But my experience with the software - just looking at pure functionality and stability - has been on a downward spiral for years. Adding insult to injury has been that the UX for non-technical users in my family has plummeted. This is mostly due to the addition of ad filled stuff no one in my family wants and there is no easy way for me to disable it for them.
If you like where Plex is going, that is awesome - keep using it. There are use cases where it still excels. But there is no denying Plex has shifted most of their focus from media server software to providing ad supported streaming. The way I use the software - the way their core audience uses the software - is not necessarily compatible with the direction they are going and that is a shame.
Plex is in a tough spot because the product has some very different use cases… Grouchy server admins on one side, and casual streaming consumers on the other. Their desires are quite different and anything Plex does for the latter will anger the former.
I am not yet going to crucify Plex for sacrificing us admin users simply because it hasn’t happened yet. Yes, onboarding my new streaming users sucks in part because of stuff like Discover and Plex’s own streaming content. It is hard to explain all that to people. But the addition of the rental shop isn’t making things any harder on me yet.
I’m not really worried that Plex is going to abandon us admins. Not yet. They are still adding features for us like improved transcoding, and per-track genre support for music. If they were pulling the plug on personal media that would have stopped months ago.
As soon as Plex actually screws us admins I’ll be out the door with y’all. But it hasn’t happened yet. I will abide, and see where things go.
