Plex sunsets channels because less than 3% allegedly use them, yet not even a week later they introduce basically the same thing (except worse) in the form of “web shows”… and then they expect us to believe the two are not correlated? I don’t think anyone could be quite that gullible
Not saying Plex is in trouble… in fact I believe the opposite. They finally found a win-win-win formula. With their recent changes they ensured instantly increased revenue, valuable user statistics to trade, plus more chances to become a desirable acquisition.
It’s quite telling that they are no longer offering new features to Plex pass users first… paying customers are basically the least interesting users to them now because they only demand non-essential stuff like “no ads” and “more privacy”… who needs that, right?
Sorry @anon18523487, you’re in no position to actually know that. I’ll trust that investors will do what ever they need to to see large financial return before I trust the “main goal” of any company.
Yep, these are the main goals of the company. And it shows.
You must be joking. With that sole sentence you lost any credibility to your argument.
Subtitles can be the #1 dealbreaker for non-english speakers. Searching for subtitles from your couch is the most welcome improvement in a long time.
Ok, so you don’t believe the word of an employee of the company who is repeating the same sentiment previous told by other members of the company, including the CTO who is also a co-founder of the company.
But the word of a forum user speculating without any evidence, you believe. Ok. Guess I can’t win here.
One does not necessarily exclude the other. Plex company is not a charity. Any serious company’s main concern will always be to keep the shareholders happy, keeping the same goals may or may not qualify. If the previous goal no longer satisfies the shareholders, the company will change the goal to a new one. Time will tell which in the case of Plex.
I consider the recent activities of plex as evidence - even if circumstantial.
I’ve been in management positions for publicly traded companies (which is why I have my healthy dose of skepticism ). What companies tell their employees and what they do are not at all the same thing.
Network Optix does that with their CCTV software, but it’s a lot more expensive by comparison.
The model works (sometimes) because software duplication and distribution doesn’t have a cost to speak of. So as long as you gain enough new customers to pay the operational costs each year, you can give the upgrade to your older customers free of charge. There may be a point where they reach market saturation, at which point the model would start to fail.
Wow, an attack on one of few Plex People that really try to help. That is kind of like kicking the only dog in the pack that did not try to have you for lunch.
@anon18523487 is one of the Plex good guys. I do not always agree with him but when asked he does try to help and he always gives accurate information.
Attacking a person, any person, just because you don’t like what they say is childish at best. It is kind of behavior I would expect by a group of 12 year olds that have decided that one of their number is not good enough to be part of the group. In other words it is a pathetic attempt at bullying.
Well how many new customers can you acquire? Any other business lives from happy customers who buy other goods from you, renew the subscription or whatever. Normally you buy a software and receive updates and bugfixes, but the next major release is due for another payment (btw emby has this in its TOS). Otherwise you need to generate new customers infinitely, which is impossible, or you hit a wall where the market is saturated.
So you either cancel lifetime or generate other sources of income, which is what Plex is doing right now. You still receive a “better”/updated product principally “for free” and you do not have to use any of the New features.
Btw I am a non-english speaker and don’t use subtitles at all. All content that I acquire is in my native language since I don’t download.
But still: subtitle support was heavily improved natively by Plex, so there is obviously not much to complain about. Subtitles are still there…
It’s a little strange/telling to see the same 2-3 people hopping amongst different threads repeating the same things over and over again, that the sky is falling! It reminds me a few years ago some craft brewery I like switched to using blank caps on their bottles for a month because they temporarily ran out of branded ones, and this convinced some people online that they were somehow on the verge of going out of business. They’re still here. People will invent a conspiracy theory about anything that they don’t like.
I really feel for the people who legitimately utilized plugins on a regular basis - but if someone told me that I could trade plugin support for consistently functional sync on Android, I’m all onboard for that.
Yes, newer features that might be used by just as few people as plugins are cropping up with an eye toward generating revenue, and the one that they’ve taken away was probably subtracting revenue from others. If you don’t like the features, don’t use them. Plex is never going to take away your ability to stream and sort your media libraries - this is why we are here after all and the original purpose of the product. No one ever subscribed to Plex specifically for the plugin support, or if they did, it was 1% of the 2% of people who were using the feature.
Plex isn’t perfect, I had big issues with how they rolled out the new XB1 and Android clients, both of which are finally in acceptable condition to me. It wasn’t enough to get me to switch though, and it’s promising to see that they are finally doing it right with the Roku beta.
If I were them, I’d also stop selling lifetime passes if generating ongoing revenue is a concern, as I imagine it should be. Maybe do one last black Friday sale and then say that all future subs are only monthly or something like that.
That’s pretty much how I see it as well… I’ll happily use news/web shows here and there if it keeps the lights on for them rather then adding another monthly fee to the already growing death by a thousand cuts landscape we’re in.
The problem with this is that they aren’t “extras”. When they are forced on users without the admin (your customer) being able to control this it’s not an “extra”.
The idea for Podcasts, news and web shows isn’t bad in itself but the implementation is poor at best. Would have been far better to be fully controlled by the server admin so these items only show as a library on their server.
Users don’t know what Plex is and doesn’t care. They care about the person’s server they downloaded and loaded the client to connect to. When they also see these other content sources pop up it’s assumed the server op is proving this data.
There is no age restrictions or any way to flag certain content. I remember one of the first videos that popped up when I originally tested News was “grab em by the p*ssy” video that was all over the news. That’s not child appropriate and when the server admin has setup age restrictions on his/her library and shares with a niece or something you don’t want this content showing any shape or form.
Plex’s design puts far to much undue burden on the admin. Now the admin has to email parents to tell them to log into their kids Plex account and give specific instructions how to turn this age inappropriate content off. That’s not what admins want. Content should NEVER be shown unless it’s approved by the admin PERIOD.
Plex has no idea who is using the client but the admin does and has ZERO control over the content.
The fact that the content comes from a different server matters ZERO to many admins. The very fact that this content is available when the client is only used for their server is troubling.
Plex needs to get back to basics and allow the experience to be controlled by the admin.
I wouldn’t call it forced, since there is an option to turn them off. Some features are turned on by default. It’s a way of providing visibility to the feature. It’s a “Hey we have this feature you might like, but if not you can turn it off.” There are lots of questions here in the forums of users asking for a new feature when it’s already there and they just didn’t know about it.
Yes, it may be a little inconvenient for those that don’t want these features and that’s why we offer an option to turn these off.
Also, these features like podcasts, news, and web shows can be used by users that don’t have their own servers. This allows them to get introduced to Plex by just having a Plex account and nothing else.
Yeah, that is an issue. Unfortunately, online news, like most online stuff, don’t have age ratings. Maybe the internet will catch up with broadcast TV one day and require age ratings on all their content.
To be honest, I don’t think that’s a very good answer or for that matter a responsible one. If Plex is serious about introducing these features you should urge your content providers to include the rating when signing the licensing agreement. If we the users are requesting and you don’t push it to your providers the internet will never change…
Well this has happened before… Remember boxee (probably not), started somewhat similar, did somewhat similar, ended up with Samsung.
“We thought there is a place for product that puts the user first and enables access to all content, not for Apple or Microsoft to decide what you can and can’t access.” CEO and founder Avner Ronen (Boxee). Source: TheGuardian
I would and do. The way many of us look at it is if someone is loading the software specifically to use our server then EVERYTHING that shows up (one way or another) is seen as part of our system. That includes, News, PodCasts, WebShows and any other similar service.
Admin has ZERO control over this content as it’s always shown without the admin consent. Even when the admin wants this content, it doesn’t really fit. Sort of there, sort of not there. It would have been a lot better to make these phantom libraries so that they seem like part of the admin’s library itself (and fully controllable). They’d probably get more use as well as they would be more visible.
It’s a royal pain the in @ass to try and talk user through the procedure to turn this off. If a user is using a Shield TV and complaining about this they can’t do anything about it until the turn on a computer, login, goto the website, fumble through menus to find the options, etc
Try talking a person through that process without being at the computer mimicking the process! It would be so much easier when a person says I don’t want and the admin logs in (even with cell phone) hits his admin site and removes access for the person!
So this way when a person only uses the software to connect to my server they only see my content I approve of. If they happen to also have access to another server someone provides them then they get the content THAT admin wants them to have when connected to THEIR server.
Right now this approach will push more people away from Plex then get new clients. This might change if/when the content improves however.
We’ve talked about this before elsewhere so you know my feelings on these types of things. I also know you yourself can’t change this so…
I’m certainly not opposed to content like this as an option. I’m opposed to the lack of control and integration as just mentioned. For example I’d have PodCasts as a “Library” if possible so it was easy to find and seem like it’s integrated far better. With the new PMP2 style UI this would have been easier to do as it can already create a working interface where content libraries are stored on different servers under the admin’s control. This would have just been an extension of that principle with Plex owned servers.
While I do understand that and mostly agree I do think that if a new feature is suddenly going to be shown somewhere it should be able to be turned off from where it is first seen.
I know that increases complexity but it is somewhat poor design when a device says “Look at this.” But if you do not want it you are not allowed to turn it off from where it is first seen and there are no directions given when it pops up that says “Go here to turn this off if you don’t want it.”
For some people even getting into the server settings is a pain and it is made worse when something shows with no explanation as to where to go to change its settings.
For me I do not care much as it is easy for me but a lot of your users do not understand the system as well as I.
I get that. But how is Plex suppose to know that this is the reason a user has a Plex account. If a user has a regular Plex account, they really should learn a little about it and what that entails, don’t you think. This is not the first content we’ve provided, and I don’t know if this will be the last. If users you are sharing with don’t want to deal with having a Plex account, then maybe consider making them managed accounts, then you do have control over what content they see.
That is a fair point. Having to go to their account settings is a bit troublesome. This I can bring up with the team.
I’ve been around. I used the boxee software, bought the boxee box and used boxee+ for about a year after they were sold to samsung (which is why I didn’t use plex). I only recently got rid of it this year (but I hadn’t used it for ages). One of the best media boxes ever made - IMO - simple effective UI, and played everything.
If you check out Ronen’s history he starts companies in order to sell them. From what I remember (I could be wrong), Samsung got rid of the Boxee team shortly after acquiring them.
Plex should be trying to get series c funding in the next 2 years if all goes to plan and this media stuff gives them the boost they want. Depending how they do after their funding I imagine they’ll sell 2 - 5 years after that.
I have no DVD/Bluray that doesn’t have subtitles in at least 3 languages. Every one of those has subtitles in English and/or it’s original language. Some have upwards of 8 - 10 languages!!!
I don’t understand, do people not know how to rip their own media?
). What companies tell their employees and what they do are not at all the same thing.
