If this is the way Plex is going to treat it’s customers, I would LOVE a refund for my lifetime Plex Pass i bought years back. I bought a ton of Plex merch over the years to help support them too, now I wish I never gave them a dime!
What a slap in the face for those of us who can’t host at home because we don’t have the bandwidth. Going after the most popular and most affordable hosting provider in the world? I don’t even share with anyone, I’m the only person who uses my Plex server. Why should I get punished for other peoples actions?
Hopefully Plex will go out of business. I see more layoffs in Plex’s future. What a rude way to treat thousands of people who have supported them financially over the years and did nothing wrong.
Looks like Plex vastly underestimated the amount of legitimate users hosting their servers remotely. This is one of the fastest growing threads in recent memory.
Hopefully, some more thought will be put into this sledgehammer decision.
However, Plex is not free to decide which provider to host the software with. This is clearly going too far. As already described, this clearly violates competition law in the EU. I can well imagine that Hetzner will not put up with this and will file a complaint with the EU if no solution can be found.
Except they’ve clearly indicated they don’t want anybody hosting in a proper datacenter and have alluded to future ISP bans despite having always been network neutral. It’s disingenuous to imply this isn’t a fundamental change in the agreement in spite of any language in the TOS or technicalities of what services the Plex Pass enables.
May they be allowed to do this under their TOS? Probably? I don’t really care. It’s a betrayal of the userbase and folks are extremely correct to be mad about it
You could’ve just said you didn’t actually know what you were talking about. But, to give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you could explain how you think the provider of free software who has no commercial relationship with any hosting companies could be in breach of competition laws here?
Agreed. I don’t even remotely host and I am getting in on the action because I know I was that close to be in the position many here are. Plex just woke a sleeping giant and poked the honeybadger by pulling this stunt.
