PLEX USED to be a fairly good App, a bit glitchy and it freezes at least once per movie but it was ok for a one off payment (Per-User of course). Now it has a subscription charge and is far more expensive that just using your own server should ever be. These issues now need to be addressed since it’s premium.
Is it straight forward and easy to solve issues? Not at all.
Do the technical steps work after pages and pages of reading and searching? Nope.
Can you contact someone who can test and problem solve it for you? Of course not.
Can you at least email someone or contact someone about it? Don’t be silly, that’s what the endless labyrinth of FAQs and Forums are for.
Is it worth a monthly subscription? In my honest opinion no.
I NEVER watch ANY of PLEX’s movies, shows or music I’m very particular about what I watch. But since I’m now paying for them I thought I’d take a look at what there is. Surprise, surprise not even 10 mins in advert, consistently through the movie what’s worse the same advert every time over and over. What’s premium for if it’s riddle with ads? Seems silly to pay for the privilege of not being able to remove or block them entirely.
Sort it out PLEX or your going to start losing more and more customers
The remote watch pass is specifically for what its name says… you being able to use Plex for watching content from remote servers.
It’s not related to their ad-supported video on demand service.
That being said. Not sure what other technical issues you have as you don’t mention any details.
No, bin Plex, let them fail as company and look for a better one that is just about your stuff, rather than paying for garbage you never wanted in the first place.
Your Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass, whatever you got, has nothing to do with the movies and shows Plex offers. Those are free and supported by the ads for everyone.
You can turn this off from your account setting in Plex Web. Under Online Media Sources, disable “Movies & Shows”.
Auto playing a series stops after 3 episodes. So you then have to manually skip videos. Which is seriously tedious when you use it to sleep to. Nearly every movie glitches and freezes at least once per playthrough and requires skipping forward or a hard reset, not doing so will just leave it frozen in place on screen indefinitely. I have no issues when using any other players for the videos. It’s fully not worth a monthly payment to watch my OWN content when it’s so unreliable.
That huge ad revenue dried up is my understanding. Advertisers started paying less for their ads. So, that is why other companies started placing more ads in the breaks; to make up for the losses.
Yeah that’s no comfort though and no solution. I would presume whomever their financial team are, suggested subscription payments, less staff, add their own movies which they can run ads on, more ads and to make the service as autonomous as possible to maximize profits. Problem is that a huge amount of people won’t want to pay a monthly subscription to watch their own content. Which is what Plex was intended for, right? A service that allows you to watch your own content from a media server. Not movies and shows provided by Plex. The selection of content they do provide is awful anyway. Their primary cost after maintenance seems to be purchasing rights and licenses to movies to show on the Plex platform (for free?). Which nobody wanted or asked for. Honestly after reading up on the situation it sounds more to me like they shot themselves in the foot, but instead of backtracking and fixing the problem they put a sob spin on the story and rolled it out.
My hope is Plex can get back to their roots when they were profitable. If I remember correctly, Elan (Plexamp) stated that the lifetime memberships weren’t impacting profitability before Plex offered free ad supported streaming options.
However, that was a small team. Not the Plex corporate they were trying to become.
The question is, did the venture capital interests leave recently or are they still running the show? If still around, as I assume, when do they cut losses and sell off Plex to recoup some cash. A small profitable company isn’t one they wish to hang on to. They just need to make Plex attractive to other buyers.
I do too. But realistically it’s just another soon to be faceless company owned by someone like Google or Amazon dedicated completely to profit and not user experience. That’s another reason I’ll be out. When they start looking to sell I’m gone.
I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the reason all these changes are being implemented. They’re already looking to sell and they want to show how innovative they are to make their product enticing to buyers.
True, I don’t know for sure, but Plex has been around quite a long time so I would assume as much. Companies usually don’t last this long running in the red. Plus, Elan once stated the company was financially doing well, however that could be based on other factors other than profit.
They have been looking to sell. Compare their staff page currently to the archive.org version of it from several years ago. They changed not that long ago to have their bios be related to how successful they were in previous mergers and acquisitions. It’s all a bunch of marketing copy to make it look like the aquisition “dream team” to any word her buyers.
Hell you can look at their sec filings and notice that their entire c-suite staff have been completely restructured and consolidated likely to make any buyout far easier to manage.
