@hthighway said:
And that’s why I wrote “If you CAN DIRECTPLAY”
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. My Roku reports it is direct playing a file and the server says it is direct playing but the playback fails. The same file hosted locally direct plays fine through Plex. So I “can” direct play in that everything tries to direct play but it fails for some reason.
It has been reported to the Plex Cloud developer and to the Roku developer but neither has responded in a while. I have been told that a large part of the developer group is on vacation or some sort of thing. I do find that being on vacation at this point of the Plex Cloud beta is a little strange but it is their product not mine and maybe they were burning out or something.
@hthighway said:
And that’s why I wrote “If you CAN DIRECTPLAY”
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. My Roku reports it is direct playing a file and the server says it is direct playing but the playback fails. The same file hosted locally direct plays fine through Plex. So I “can” direct play in that everything tries to direct play but it fails for some reason.
It has been reported to the Plex Cloud developer and to the Roku developer but neither has responded in a while. I have been told that a large part of the developer group is on vacation or some sort of thing. I do find that being on vacation at this point of the Plex Cloud beta is a little strange but it is their product not mine and maybe they were burning out or something.
I understand what you were getting at, and I’m sure the detailed explanation will benefit other reading.
My point, again is, if the media can,will,is able to DIRECTPLAY you can avoid the Plex Cloud transcoders and stream directly from Amazon
And yes, employees are currently on their annual get together
I wonder how they gonna make money from plex cloud. A lot of ressources are needed to manage all the transcoding. And you get all of that for just 150$? for ever? highly unlikely.
@P4TR said:
I wonder how they gonna make money from plex cloud. A lot of ressources are needed to manage all the transcoding. And you get all of that for just 150$? for ever? highly unlikely.
They are counting on people making a bad decision and going month to month or year to year. There have been actual studies that show that even if a lifetime purchase is much cheaper for the period that people will reasonable keep a service people generally choose the plan that costs the least up front.
People see up-front cost much better than they perceive long term savings.
In fact monthly is mostly chosen over yearly for the same reason.
So Plex is probably counting on a continuing income base to monetize their service and I am pretty sure their projections show a hefty increase in Plex Pass subs once this is working well.
Also they are probably going to jump the Price for a Plex Pass again and may very well follow through with their statement that a the Lifetime Plex Pass is going away. (The have said that those of us already with Lifetime will keep it)
There also may be some deal with Amazon figuring that Plex Cloud will drive more business Amazon’s way.
A business deal like this one can have many many avenues of income and sometimes it is less than obvious. No one income tendril is sufficient to justify the probable costs but when you add all of them together I bet Plex will see a VERY good profit. Just think of all the things that Amazon charges for that may be able to be incorporated in Plex Cloud in the future.
But first they need to get it working right and that appears some time away. Until then we have no way to really know what Plex has ultimately planned for income streams generated through Plex Cloud.
A small update on my end. I have had the Plex Beta for about 2 weeks now. So far I have uploaded about 1TB of data to Amazon Cloud.
At the moment, I have to say Plex Cloud is rather slow to stream, so for those of you who are still waiting for the Beta, don’t worry, it all feels pretty WIP at the moment.
Also worth noting that sometime, the Plex Cloud Library is not accessible at all. For example, I have not been able to connect to it all morning, despite Amazon Cloud being up and me uploading data to it.
