Went to listen to a podcast today and found the announcement about the service being killed.
As has been said before, I signed up for Plex to consolidate my media. Everything Plex has done in the last couple of years has shown a disinterest in the original purpose of the platform.
beckfield, please, do give a toss and tell your dog-obsessed boss that PODCASTS ON PLEX WERE MEGA! Have him put it back on. I mean, you resurrected HTPC concept, which really is a niche. Podcasts tho, theyâre up-and-coming!
thank you.
Every feature theyâre prioritizing above this is utterly useless. I donât understand why this needs to be removed, why not just leave it in place and say youâre just not going to maintain it anymore? I will never understand expending effort to take away features when it costs you nothing to just leave it there. Like it literally takes zero effort to just do nothing, it takes more to go in and gut this for no reason.
I donât like what Plex is becoming. I donât want âTidalâ, I donât want random tv channels or web videos, I just want what used to be the best tool to aggregate my own content. Stop adding extra â â â â no one asked for, especially if itâs at the expense of features we already have that we actually want.
âPodcastsâ is the PRIMARY reason I purchased a PLEXPASS!! Without Podcasts, Plex is nearly useless to me. Plex provided a nice, clean way to organize and listen to podcasts on my smartphone, with only one app⊠and it WORKED!! Many of the other apps for listening to podcasts are stream specific and so you need multiple apps. This is just the wrong direction for Plex to go in⊠I feel cheated.
I just wanted to share this twitter interaction. IMO there was no real reason to remove podcast support and it only inconveniences the users that actually support this company, aka the plex pass holders and âpower usersâ. Is that really the direction you want to go plex? Please reconsider. We know there are alternatives. The problem is we donât WANT an alternative. We like it all in one place, as has been working for 95% of users for years.
Not that Iâm defending Plexâs decision-making, but they DID send an email out to users around the same time they posted it on Announcements.
Itâs always interesting to see how other people use Plex. I have ~20 different users on my server. Only one of them has paid for a Plex Pass, and thatâs only because they got the Bug and wanted to run their own server (oddly enough that person is my dad, at 72, lol). The rest of my users (only a handful for managed users, the rest are Friends) only use it for watching movies on their big screen TVâs.
The question is⊠Does Plex really lose anything if users that donât pay for a Plex Pass and only watch the media I serve up leave? Sure, they can say they have X Million users (and they probably do when talking to their venture capital overlords) but how many of those users provide data they can monetize?
Plex keeps on jiggling the Annoyance Meter with me as well⊠I hate that every time they make a change, they remove the ability for local customization. Iâm still fuming over the merging of On Deck and Continue Watching, for example (thereâs no reason that canât be a server-side option to toggle on or off).
I honestly donât really have a problem with adding things to provide a revenue stream, or occasionally removing a feature that isnât financially viable to continue updating⊠thatâs the nature of software development. The thing that makes me keep an eye on their competition (Jellyfin, Emby) is when they make changes to the core service that deviate from the original reason I got the software in the first place.
Strange, I didnât get this one, and I have the impression that a lot of other people didnât either.
I never used the feature (but then I never have used photo features). And whilst thereâs multitudes of ways to play podcasts, I like the theoretical idea of Plex being the thing to serve all media (well all audio and video at least) types.
And it does remind me of how Iâve been begging for audiobook support for what seems like a decade. And cutting podcasts probably further lessens the chance of getting it simply due to feature bloat and limited staff to support it given itâs a minority feature like podcasts.
I used to also play my podcasts on my Sonos speakers using Plex. I found out that Pocket Casts also has Sonos integration and TBH it works better than Plex although that doesnât make Plexâs discontinuation any less annoying
Way to defend Plex 
No, seriously, I just checked and the last Plex-mail I got was on April 5th (âStream without the struggleâŠâ), with no mention of podcasts whatsoever.
Still, this calms me down a little bit, it may have gone to spam or I might not have checked the newsletter box for âthings that go awayâ or something.
I am incensed that, day by day, Plex continues to degrade. Dropping podcasts is more than an inconvenience; it is a major downgrade, which by the way also essentially kills much of Plexampâs usefulness as well. I used that for streaming podcasts on the road, or preloaded podcasts before becoming disconnected from the internet.
Claiming that maintaining podcast functionality is some big drain on resources is baloney. Plex has outdone itself in crapping on existing, paying users, turning this software into some kind of âfreeâ streaming service like Crackle or some other ad-infested provider. Although in this case, Plex seeks to capture all advertising revenue themselves, as if they were some major player, which they are obviously not. I could instead use those services directly if I wanted to, watching bottom tier movies, or short clips of news or other similar âpremiumâ content. Can you tell? I donât want to.
Greed is not good, if youâre wondering . . .
Forgot to add; I was also not notified by email, or any other communication. And sadly no, brilliant Plex staff, this notification is not in âspamâ (though many of them should be.)
Well, they emailed you, but not me. And I didnât delete anything.
Besides that, what kind of bastards give you only 7 days to get your data migrated? If youâre on holidays, ill, working abroad or didnât check the email every day, then what?
And besides that, they never told how to migrate all the podcasts on family membersâŠ
No, friend, this is a big slap in our face, a stab in the back, made in bad faith with premeditation and malice aforethought.
Another one and counting.
I wonder why⊠and yes, I missed, if they announced it the same way they did with podcasts, I obviously didnât notice.
I just enter here when I have an issue, to see if someone has any solution. Or to realize something that was working stopped because the changed something (like the EPG guide) and broke it, or like this, that seems they want pass users to leave. Probably we arenât profitable enough. They probably did a study of how many lifetime plex pass users are out there and I would bet we are the vast majority, so we arenât profitables enoughâŠ
If Plex was soooooo worried about the Lifetime Plex Pass users, similar to Netflixâs war on password sharing, these companies should have changed those decisions years ago when they saw that it hurt them. All this talk lately in the industry of BOTTOM LINE nonsense but yet these companies lured many of us users in with such stupid, unstable business models. THEY SET THE TONE! Both Netflix and Plex seem to have big issues in making sure they donât hemorrhage but at the same time theyâve done nothing but hurt their user bases.
If Plex saw bottom line issues with business models, primarily the Lifetime pass, then they should have made changes ASAP like they been shuttering their features and services. It would have been abrupt, but it may, just may have stabilized priorities for their feature pipelines. They had plenty of time to have figured that out. Now, many of us are frustrated.
This discussion of the longevity of the Lifetime plan offering has been discussed many times amongst us on both Reddit and the forum. Why Plex didnât make changes of their tiers? The hell if I know.
This corporate double speak is annoying and more maddening by the month.
GET IT TOGETHER!
Yeah, that so many of us didnât receive the email yet another issue with Plex. I used Podcasts daily, but no email, not even in my spam folder. I got plenty of other emails from them, though.
Apparently they canât even get their email to work.
AND their platform has a system for announcements with the little icon showing alerts. They could have used that, too, but they didnât.
I wonder if the reasoning theyâre ditching Podcasts is super simple? They donât have a way to monetize it. This would make the case for removing resources assigned to support it.
Well it sounds to me like Plex is evolving with what amounts to fashion shifts in content distribution, basically taking advantage of a new opportunity regardless of how profitable or not the Plex Pass business model is.
Today Plex can sell out its userbase to commercials-included streaming services, so thatâs exactly what theyâre doing. I wouldnât be surprised if the ones buying that userbase doesnât know what weâre like, and doesnât know that so many of us are completely uninterested in their commercials.
Maybe in a year or two those commercial providers will see that they wasted a bunch of money buying us, the cash will dry up, and Plex will go back to serving us instead of serving us up to others. Maybe we wonât still be here to subscribe, though.
I can definitely see that, that Plex is currently trying to take advantage of their user base for more streaming possibilities but honestly, like mentioned in this news clip about Netflix, the peak might already have happened. Like what Netflix is doing right now, trying to cut costs while also trying to forge ahead with milking whatâs left of their subscription numbers, the end may be near. Subscriptions are piling high, inflation is squeezing, and everyone will be realizing that cable subscriptions are cheaper and bring more value instead of subscriptions to Plex and all these separate services. Something tells me that Plex might just be too late to the ball game here and while trying to get all their users onboard, will only force us all to leave in droves.
Sorry, but even if people are worried about their local media libraries, subscriptions with Plex lose their value and we might as well start taking care of OUR BOTTOM LINE in our households too. Jellyfin is free, Emby is optional as well, and there are a separate but possible ideal options for music, even ebooks. Been a user of Calibre since 2014 since Plex never evolved into anything else beyond music and video.
Plex inc. has to realize that we can leave for greener pastures despite not having their additional fluff.
