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
