I would be interested to see what these numbers looked like if you only factored either paying customers, and/or server owners.
To counterpoint, I would put solid money on the fact that the vast majority of users playing these videos have never once had a subscription, or paid a dime in any way.
I’d even further bet that almost every HTPC user is a paying customer.
This is so disappointing! I have a perfect setup with PMP as my main player and I’m not buying another hardware for a lesser experience. Over the years I have recommended Plex to a lot of people and around 40 users stream from my server. If I’m forced to shut down my server they will go with it.
Maybe if every HTPC user that has done this re-enables this so they go “oh snap, we were soooo wrong”
Since my dedicated thread its being totally ignored, can anyone from Plex chime in with why the new Plex app only supports 10.12 and up? What feature was added that demands dropping El Capitan? I have multiple computers that are being made useless as Plex machines as they’ll not be usable with remotes which doesn’t matter anyway as the entire app isn’t supported on them any more.
I get it’s an old system, I’m just curious which feature specifically has forced you to increase the minimum system version to 10.12.
I’ll be completely honest, I really respect your decision. I don’t agree with it and as I user I did complain against this decision, but in my professional life I’m a product owner myself and understand the struggle. You constantly have to balance the pro’s and con’s of each decision and if you only have €100 to invest, you want to invest it in something you think the market wants.
If you / Plex as a company think that HTPC are not the future (weighing into whatever amount of users use HTPC which you now risk on churning against the millions of users and whatever amount of users you could gain by focusing on other stuff) and that it’s time to say goodbye to it then it’s your business decision.
For Plex as a company, I can only hope that you did your market research correct and that you don’t loose more customers with this decision then you would gain. That is however the challenge and responsibility you take as CEO, CTO, product manager or product owner.
I also admire that you reply to some of the users but if you’re not going to change your decision, there won’t be a lot of words, statistics, visions,… that can help. The users here are emotional (which you must understand yourself as well) and typically don’t really care to whatever you have to say.
Change is hard (on both sides) and again, if it’s the correct decision on a long term then it will be your win, if it wasn’t then your responsibility.
For me as a user, I’ll wait and see (there might be a chance that you do doubt the decision and revert) and if the time comes, I’ll move to where you started: XBMC - Kodi.
If we only look at Plex Pass subscribers, that percentage is still about 94%. The number of users who have opted out of sending playback data is also very small, and not likely to have a significant impact on that percentage.
While there are those of you who have been using Plex Media Center, Plex Home Theater, and now Plex Media Player since the early days, there are even more who started using Plex with those early apps and have moved on to other setups. We wouldn’t be making this move if we didn’t think there are good alternatives that have come a long way over the past couple years and we will continue to work on adding more advanced player features to them based on feedback we are seeing here among other places.
That said, we also recognize that some of you have little interest in migrating away from Plex Media Player. This is why we have continued to work on the TV UI in PMP, by bringing the new UNO design to the platform for example. We will be continuing to work on UI enhancements in PMP up until the end of life date.
We want to leave PMP in a healthy, stable spot that can continue to be used with Plex Media Server. While no official support means that there is no promise that it will continue working for years to come, we have also proven to be very conservative with breaking changes in Plex Media Server. I know a lot of you are upset with the idea of new features not being added to PMP after six months and this might not come as any consolation, but if you like the app as it is today, nothing would be immediately changing for you in January 2020.
@ericmatthys Speaking of new features, could you please confirm if you’re considering adding buffer size settings and audio passthrough to the new player? For me, these are the only two things that keep me from switching.
Of course I’m not asking for any ETA or specific release dates, I’m just curious if these two things can be implemented in the new player of if there are any technical limitations making it impossible or highly improbable.
Yes, we are actively discussing both of those settings. More on that shortly.
So basically you are saying that support for HTPC won’t be intentionally stopped (= remove the “legacy” code), but that you just won’t do any effort to introduce new features on it?
It would be a very important nuance in the story you are telling.
If that is the case, then you’ll make a lot of people happy I assume. I’m still using Plex Home Theater (which hasn’t gotten any updates since 4 years now) but still works like a charm. Who cares that I can’t see video trailers or see IMDB rating in it.
You know something I know this is NOT gonna suddenly calm the waters for everyone sadly.
However, it is one of the most open, honest replies that I have ever seen from a Plex employee.
I have no idea of your current role but you should clearly be head of PR. 
This probably summed up the situation nicely too.
We will not be actively preventing people from continuing to use PMP in TV mode after its end of life and there are no plans to introduce breaking changes to Plex Media Server that would prevent PMP from continuing to work with it.
End of support in this case means we are stopping feature development and bug fixes.
Sorry, but that’s simply not good enough. You haven’t “proven” to be anything. The interfaces change constantly, you continually added new features no one asked for while completely ignoring things people actually wanted, and at this point I effectively wasted my money on my Plex pass because you have ignored everything I (and many other users that bought in early) have said for several years. That’s a strong track record of screwing over the users - especially those of us that bought in back when Plex was only a promise. Frankly, you can take this condescending corporate attitude and shove off.
Thank you for this confirmation and great news for everyone who is worried. OK, there is still a bit of a worry (because you’ll most likely only perform a very limited amount of testing on it) but the topic “Killing PMP” is (from my point of view) maybe too exaggerated.
Basically it’s feature frozen. The only worry is that at any moment in time it might break if the Plex Media Server introduces a breaking change (which is not intentionally planned).
So if luck is on our side, it won’t break for the next years to come. We’ll simply not see any of the new features you might add in the future.
I don’t really know if this was originally the plan, that I misunderstood the originally communication or that Plex decided to revert the decision partially based on the feedback, but - from my side at least - thank you.
Good enough for me.
I may actually have a solution to this… Not sure if anyone else has suggested it but…
@elan @DaveBinM @BigWheel @ericmatthys and any other Plex bod who is listening…
If this is all about money, and spending it wisely by distributing your development resources where you feel is more appropriate, then I for one would be MORE than happy to take my wallet out and pay a MODEST yearly fee to keep PMP / TV Mode alive and kicking.
So…
Turn PMP into a Premium App… Call it Plex Premium, or whatever you like!
Charge us a reasonable monthly / yearly fee.
Let us help you to help us!
So lets say that you currently have 10,000 users that use TV Mode…
10,000 Users x £5 a year = £50,000 a year.
Or…
10,000 Users x £10 a year = £100,000 a year.
Or whatever! You get the point…
Let the product pay for itself…
I’m damn sure the community wouldn’t mind paying a reasonable monthly / yearly fee to keep it alive.
It all comes down to how much!
I asked you a few days ago…
That’s a genuine question, and I have proposed a genuine possible answer…
So, as you stated…
Indeed, lets have a healthy level headed discussion about how we can all come to an agreement where everyone wins - Including you!
Any chance you would open source the code so that other developers can continue the support then?
Edit: It is: https://github.com/plexinc/plex-media-player
Well that’s my vote removed from the poll.
Not necessarily… If this is something that we as users would be happy to pay for (depending on how much) then the poster of the poll can just rename it again.
Come on guys… Who here would be willing to pay a modest fee?
Although the vote is looking quite healthy so far…
What if it’s only 1,500 users. Is that worth $40 a year or so? I don’t know how much it would take to pay for itself. But would end users pay that much every year, instead of just buying a Roku device for $60 and hiding the server somewhere out of the way?
I don’t know, but that’s the point!
If Elan was to see that we were willing to pay to keep it alive, then lets all have a discussion.
Only he knows the true numbers, and all he has to do is get his calculator out and then come back to us with some figures.
Personally, I believe it is actually significantly more that 10,000 globally. i think its TENS of thousands.
But if he AND the community is willing to consider other options, then lets talk!
In other words, lets stop battering Plex for the decision that we hate, and come up with other options - And surely Money Talks!
