Topic. I’m all for paying down your tech debt and getting to a good place. Don’t take away lots of functionality from people while you do it. Call this Plex 2 or something else.
Yes! A lot of people are upset! Please also see thread here: https://forums.plex.tv/t/watch-together-going-away-in-app
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I agree, I am very disappointed with the Plex Experience app. I don’t like it at all, and I am 100% sure I will never upgrade to this app. If, in the future, Plex Experience replaces the Plex app, I will not continue to upgrade any of my Plex apps.
Either release Plex Experience as a separate new app, or make sure that after the release of the new Plex Experience app, all older versions of the Plex app still work properly, because I will not upgrade my clients.
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You guys are dreaming if you think they care. It’s been years since they were interested in anything but profit at the expense of user satisfaction.
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Doesn’t hurt to try. If not, I’ll move to another platform.
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I hope they will clarify their intentions in this regard so that people can at least take steps to mitigate in advance and either find ways to block updates or find alternative products. It was surprising to read in that Watch Together email that it’s taken them 2 years to come up with this new “Experience” given the state it’s in and the terrible design choices they’ve arrived at.
Stating that it is nearing official release is also worrying as I thought the point of the Experience Preview was to gather feedback but it doesn’t seem like they are listening to feedback on the design or usability at all and are using it mainly to catch bugs. Having tried the Preview it’s just not really useful or usable in its current form. Unless they miraculously listen to the avalanche of feedback on the new design then without access to the current apps I can’t see how I can continue to use Plex unless I use 3rd party apps or go through the hassle of moving to an alternate media server platform. I’d have to do the same with my parents’ Plex server too as there’s no chance they’ll be able to find their content in the new version.
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They won’t. They’re fueled by greed and profits. Until we all leave for another platform and cut into their profits, they won’t listen.
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Okay, for you guys to make sense about all this greed stuff, it means that they’re purposefully making it worse for what? To get less users? What exactly do they gain by making it terrible?
And yes I’m in the camp that hopes they make it a separate app or an optional new interface that people can use if they want to.
I really like the idea of having them do Plex 2 and letting folks stick with Plex 1 with a feature freeze. Maybe just some critical fixes\updates for a couple years.
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I think the biggest thing is for them to not have the new app replace the old app until they are at feature parity (even if as you indicated they don’t add any new features to the old app).
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They are attempting to go after a broader demographic that will use Plex as a general streaming service, allowing them to deliver ads and profit off data from those consumers. They seem to be hoping to gain enough of a general user base that it won’t really impact them if the hardcore veterans are unhappy, as they already paid for Plex Pass years ago and are not interested in most media outside of their own servers.
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By making products that suck?
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By using the word of mouth of the original hardcore users as a springboard to create a more profitable streaming app that no longer needs to cater to that original base. Why dedicate dev time to features for longtime customers if you can’t continually squeeze them for money and data? The upcoming Plex app not including many old features like watch together, is a prime example of this.
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My theory is that the studio partners that they license content from are pressuring them in some way to de-emphasize the personal media server aspect of Plex, which explains the wacked UI decisions.
They really should separate the two products… People who have personal media servers generally don’t have an interest in yet another “free” streaming service, but many of them would probably pay a yearly subscription fee for a quality media server with actual development behind it.
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Nah, this is not the first time that Plex UI designers chose to have the bottom bar tabulated design. They did this years back to the previous UI change well before deciding to “rewrite from the ground up” with their most current PREVIEW app. You greatly underestimate how normal it is for Plex UI designers to build nonsensical and even complex configurations of their apps, including the lack of options to allow proper granular settings. Plex UI designers have usually been bad.
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Also known now as enshittification.
I really don’t mind that Plex is expanding it’s product and platform but I do mind that they are leaving behind the history of the product - and the support of the user base - that lead to their position in the market. They have their current standing because of customer advocacy. “How do I manage my own media” was answered with “just get Plex” so often that it became ubiquitous. Almost annoying to try and even talk about alternatives. 
Even QNAP and Synology kinda ditched their own media management products in favor of Plex.
Plex disregarding those legacy users because we don’t provide recurring income for Plex anymore - because we believed so much in the product be bought the lifetime pass - feels like a choice they consciously made and thus feels like a betrayal; and some their PR stuff trying to say otherwise is kinda patronizing (I’m looking at you recent fireside).
There honestly isn’t a whole lot more Plex can do to improve how Plex works for managing local media. There aren’t a lot of new things they can do to entice new users for income. It is a pretty complete feature rich platform for local media as it is right now and the incremental but substantial updates like HDR->SDR and subtitle transcoding improvements and HEVC encoding are solid updates for us local media folks but they aren’t income generating ones.
But local media as a thing people do has definitely been reducing over time. Even when it was more common for folks to be ripping Netflix DVDs and there was a plethora of XBMC clones and various MediaCenter solutions (mine used custom firmware on ReplayTVs at one point) it was still pretty niche. People asking “what do I use to rip and manage local media” is way less frequent than it used to be (even pirating is way down - or done by adding an app, not downloading content). Heck, folks are going to physical discs again - but that’s harder to do now too. So I get that Plex has fewer subscribers paying for their local media functions so they needed to find a way to make up for that loss in revenue and thus they expanded to Discovery data collection and Plex Movies & TV streaming offerings.
What I don’t like is that this has translated into enshittification with Plex chasing ever increasing annual profits. The “greedy company” route that tries to squeeze every bit of profit rather than being an equitable exchange of we give you reasonable amount of money and you provide a product we feel is worth that cost.
For example, client support is way down as I’ve had multiple reproducible playback bug reports on Roku just flat ignored despite sample files and multiple client and server logs. And if you browse the client topics you’ll see a lack of engagement or response - lots of bumps and “anybody there?” posts. Maybe you’ll get a “please share logs” or “show us your file naming” but when you do nobody comes back to it; that’s an obvious trend.
In the fireside when asked if there could be a more complete support channel for bugs and troubleshooting they said that wasn’t necessary because every forum post is reviewed by a Plex representative. That means if you don’t get a response, it’s because a Plex rep read it and chose to skip it on purpose.
To be fair, the server support side is still really good - mostly due to ChuckPa being such a great resource and advocate. If there are issues with the server platform itself they get addressed. But client and metadata issues for local media management aren’t nearly as responsive and certainly not as engaged as they used to be. Unless it’s a Discovery\Plex Movies & TV question. Same thing happens in the reddit threads too (that’s a whole other environment thing too).
AppleTV getting its Plex client sorted out is also a good thing. It’s bad that it took so long to get to it but at least something is finally being done now though Infuse definitely has the momentum there.
Folks do point to Plex promising to add support for NFO as them improving local media support but to me that’s indicating the opposite. Plex’s whole thing was that it automated the work for local admins. It grabbed the art. It grabbed the metadata. It grabbed the cast photos. As long as we followed the rules for naming things, Plex took care of the rest. Wanna influence what shows up go participate at TMDB and TVDB. Now I have to manually refresh the library to fix cast photos that were updated using their new rights based service, not TMDB, which are often not good pictures. And I have to manually add art to titles that had DMCA take downs because now they seem to block all art instead of just the offending poster or background image. NFO files to me are going backwards and putting it on me to do the work of managing it myself like I used to do before Plex (and other platforms) said “hey, you don’t need to do that anymore, we’ll do it for you”.
So with all that in mind, I really do like the idea of two different apps. Of using the “new Plex Experience” as a way to allow a Legacy Plex and New Plex. New Plex can focus on the new business model while Legacy Plex can be a feature frozen option. I know maintaining multiple branches is more work but if it gets feature frozen for the most part with bug fixes and maybe server side can get incremental updates then I think that’d feel like an acknowledgement and token for those folks who were initial customers and advocates.
I like Plex. I’ve tried Jellyfin and it works well but it’s not Plex - not yet (and it has advantages in some areas too). If I “jump ship” at this point it’ll probably be to Emby. One major reason will be because Emby and Jellyfin support forums are very actually engaged with their users … feels like old XMBC days or Plex from 6 years ago. I’ve said it posts before but how Plex engages with its users impacts our perception of the product and if Plex wants to keep customers a bit more consideration and attention to support would really help. Spending a few more resources there is really a good investment.
Anyways - I keep telling myself I’ve given up trying to expect better from Plex anymore - I’ve mentioned enshittification of the platform more than once - so I dunno why I keep trying… hopefully someone listens (aside from ChuckPa) as I really did feel like Plex was a real product to be proud of being a customer at one point.
/tedtalk
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Tell me you guys have never run a business without telling me. Businesses make bad decisions all the time, but it doesn’t directly mean that it’s because they’re “greedy.” After all, when you try to save money or earn more money yourself, but you instead ■■■■ it all up because you made a bad decision, we don’t automatically say it’s because you were “greedy.”
With the slow release cycle of the new app, it will be years before it makes it out to general release lol.
I wish Plex would develop more like Infuse - a standard weekly release cadence, info about what is planned/coming up in future releases, etc.
I have a lifetime subscription but would go back to a recurring payment (but only if Plex was willing to provide stuff like this).
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Oh, I totally understand the business aspect. They need to make money, they have VC investors expecting a return, not to mention licensing deals they have to maintain in good standing in order to get that ad revenue.
What I object to is the replacing of my five ingredient omelet with a bowl of unflavored grits and telling me that way better.
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Just tried the new preview and it doesn’t show the content on my IPv6-only server (because I’m on CGNAT) while it works perfectly on the old app. I’d say this is a deal-breaker for me. IPv6 doesn’t work on the Android version of the app either which is frustrating.
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