How do you feel about the discontinuation of podcast support?

General Discussions Plex Features
147

Sure, but keep in mind that with what I’m describing, the business will cash a few paychecks from selling its userbase even without users being onboard or interested in those services. It amounts to Plex taking advantage of both users and the distributors willing to pay to distribute.

That the distributors’ business model might be on the way out is fine, too. If Plex users wouldn’t be interested in those offerings it doesn’t matter either way. The distributors will pay Plex until they run out of money or figure out Plex users aren’t biting. Same result either way, with Plex riding the gravy train until the end.

Yeah, it’s a bit short sighted of Plex management, but they might make money off of the arrangement for years AND attract additional investment at the same time.

That’s an awful lot of potential money tempting them to ignore the Plex Pass model and go after these other opportunities.

It is cashing in their major asset of userbase, though.

149

Honestly man, this is how you know when something is circling the drain, particularly in “tech”. When the straightforward, useful correspondence around the dry stuff starts to disappear and a bunch of studiously non-committal, mealy-mouthed I’ve-just-been-to-a-3-day-mangement-retreat stuff starts to move in. And dear lord, the combination of cutesy 90s Joss Whedon “relatable” startup-ese and fart-huffing corporate marketing firm language in their blog posts and email newsletters has been getting excruciating of late. We’re talking nails on a blackboard here. Ugh.

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150

■■■■ decision.
WTF are web-shows? Content so crap that no other platform wants it?

151

Plex is circling the drain? Isn’t that the truth. LOL.

152

Personally I find Jellyfin really attractive. The ability to contribute to features and fixes directly is great!

It’s actually more customizable if you really think about it… Fix it and submit a pull request.

Here we have to post and cross fingers somebody actually gives a ■■■■ and even if somebody does give a ■■■■ it’s literal months of broken crap.

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153

I’m not familiar with the snags you’re referring to (in their effort to add basic playback features like skipping…), but being that those presumed snags involved the playing of media files like an audio mp3 file or link; they couldn’t have been insurmountable for a couple reasons. Firstly, that’s kinda what Plex is all about in the first place… it’s not like they’re adopting a new feature so alien to the core concept of Plex (let’s build a lyrics plugin that converts song lyrics from any language into Aramaic).

Secondly, such enhancements (if you take skipping, for example) did eventually wind up resolved… so whatever effort was spent into enabling or deploying that feature had already been expended once. Longstanding legacy formats (like MP3) and the use of a media player to play that legacy format, in my opinion, don’t change on a day to day basis. Sure, the adoption of some new capability might affect an old, tried and true function… but we’re talking about playing MP3’s here. It’s pretty darn fundamental.

I’m genuinely curious, did they ever state any actual examples of how much time, effort, and energy they spent enabling or maintaining podcasts? I will be the first to admit I’m wrong when faced with some concrete examples…

154

The problem is that Plex doesn’t always outwardly admit that they have hit problems behind the scenes with their infrastructure. They have a hard time admitting it when it’s vital and necessary to us users to know. Instead, we sit and wait until they decide to do whatever they want to do. Podcasts has only been added to the Plex ecosystem for 4 years. That’s pretty young in Plex’s existence considering Music, Photos, and Movies/Video files have been the standard since it’s inception.

Prior to their Podcast unveil, we use to have the ability to use channel plugins and personally I had no issue with using the TuneIn channel to access my personal saved podcasts. Was I able to download, no, but it served its purpose and was functional and didn’t break when I wanted to listen to a podcast stream.

Podcasts should have been a staple from at least 2012 or so. Now that Podcasts is a matured medium with over 40 million podcast downloads, you would think Plex, Inc would want to keep investing in it.

I’ve posted elsewhere about the launch of podcasts but essentially there was the launch in 2018, then in 2019 or so a sort of revamp of efforts for the DOWNLOADING mechanism to replace the use of the now deprecated SYNC mechanism in Plex clients, which supposedly had improved the use of included downloading rules.

There also were personal accounts of people experiencing a lack of proper saved listening states of their podcasts. The last listened position would not sync across all clients and it would be a frustrating user experience to those who thought Plex could handle such a minuscule task.

The discussion amongst Plex users about Podcasts was great at first but declined with use over the years. There were an overlap of unfortunate and unforeseen issues that I’m sure not even the Plex devs knew about but for whatever reason, they just couldn’t get everything to align properly.

Do they deserve credit for being ambitious? Sure, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. However, each and every time they attempted to improve on one issue, something else would render the experience or feature useless. Something that’s not uncommon anymore.

It took a whole year for them to ultimately decide Podcasts fate after a long winded thread that housed bump votes for Plex to inform or indicate whether or not they were going to fix the importing tool for any additional podcasts feeds that weren’t in the Plex Podcast depository. Both Plex Apps and Plex web suffered this issue. There were maybe one or two comments made by them, indicating it was being looked into and they were aware of the problem, but no resolution was made.

Not everything worked as advertised per their marketing videos or ads.

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155

Do I have to downgrade to bring podcast back?
How can a media server not serve up a major source of media?

Plex, you don’t have to support it or maintain it, just bring it back as it was and leave it.

156

Having Podcasts gone is disappointing as I had hoped to listen to my Podcasts along with all of my music (local collection, Tidal), on my stereo system via PlexAmp on Raspberry Pi – seemed an elegant solution to controlling everything I listen to in one place.

Argh! Now I will need to figure out how to hear Podcasts some other way via Raspberry Pi-- anyone have direction for this?

Thanks,
Todd

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157

I have a ton of historical podcasts saved and lectures etc.

How is everyone else handling those?

Making playlists perhaps? Own library for podcasts?

158

I really don’t download my podcasts, I’d rather save the disk space for other media (especially with the costs of “local” storage) I would suggest a audio library but the lack of true support for Audiobooks makes it a crap shoot.

I will say since I’ve moved over to Google Podcasts I really haven’t noticed a difference other than having to go mark “played” on every single podcast I’ve listened to over the last 3+ years (which is annoying and still working on) for every subscription I have and of course the agitation of having to open another app :angry:

The main issue I’m finding tough to deal with is, when I was using Plex for my podcasts, it gave me a heads up if there was a problem I needed to look at when I got home with my server or a Plex Services issue I needed to go look at the Status page. Since 6 days a week I’m in another state and no one in my house wants to learn anything with the server, they just want to watch there stuff.

159

I purchased my PlexPass after the discontinuation of the podcasts. However, I am an avid podcast consumer, and if Plex could have an interface where we could link our podcasts (there was an OPML based list you could set up in a very old version of Slim Server that worked quite well), so the Plex Media Server could “serve” these links on demand to the requesting player, that would be awesome. Especially if the PlexDB could keep track of your listening position in the server, so you can pick up the episode elsewhere - for example, start in the car in the commute, continue listening on your amp at home - that would be fantastic.

Do I regret purchasing Plex due to the lack of Podcasts? - No - I purchased it primarily as a replacement of my Logitech Media Server, with the added benefit of replacing Emby as well. Podcasts would add Google Podcasts to that list (or Spotify).

160

This is pretty cool, I need to buy another hard drive and get my Podcast downloads organized

161

I’m not happy about it, enjoyed having a single spot to consolidate

162

Just venting here as there doesn’t seem to be much hope for the return of native podcast playback in Plex. I almost immediately noticed the removal of this particular functionality on an update of my server this past April. What a disappointment! Over the years, the feature has matured into an excellent tool. Alas, Plex continues to drop features without seemingly much concern for their current patron’s desires. Instead, Plex favors creating a me-too product like Sling and/or Spotify. I remember the day I woke up and Plex no longer played iso video content or when frontend support for plugins simply evaporated… this is more of the same. I’ve read the criticism of these decisions and shrugged a bit as the core of Plex continued to be enough. These days, Plex is really starting to feel like “just” another streaming platform in a sea of similar products. I want to like Plex, and while I can still hack a bit of plugin goodness into the backend… It’s not the same as having a novel tool to aggregate MY media preferences the way I like. In the end, markets and legal frameworks drive Plex decision-makers to offer what they do and as they can. Again, this message is a vent of my disappointment with great software dumbed down to a small restricted set of commodity features. I’d really like to see Podcasts back as it was getting so good!

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163

It was a disappointing loss, most especially because it came not long after the announcement of the Plex Arcade feature. The idea of games in Plex is good but the technology and implementations available to home users isn’t there yet. Audio, and the streaming of MP3s is a part of Plex’s core competency and for that reason alone should be a component of the Plex feature set and roadmap.

While I wasn’t heavily invested, it was a matter of “yet” as I move everything into Plex. It became a priority for me just months before the feature was shuttered as I began archiving episodes of podcasts no longer available. Now I’m in a situation I don’t want to be in: Moving media out of my Plex library.

I really appreciate D_eight6 laying out the history of the Podcast feature and the challenges with its release and results. I only wish the business team and managers setting the road map at Plex would turn this into an opportunity to improve audio support across the board instead of abandoning the feature entirely.

164

I originally set up Plex as my home media server. It is where I store movies, music, photos, and TV shows. When I started using the podcast features, it was a natural extension of my home media server and made perfect sense. My thoughts and expectations were that Plex would expand and enhance that offering – not discontinue it. In essence, you’re telling me to look somewhere else for my media, not my media server. This is the problem with all of the other ‘services’ out there, none of them play well with others. You have to buy too many services and your dependent on the content they choose to provide. Even with its’ flaws, Plex was as close to a media utopia that I could find at a reasonable price. Lot’s of words to say I’m disappointed.

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165

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