So… PlexAmp is a superior option for music playback than the standard Plex app ever was.
I always did wonder though, why they didn’t roll that playback functionality and interface into the regular app to consolidate? I would way rather have one app than several. They may have been a bit ahead of their time when they were originally trying to be a “One app for everything” solution several years back. I find myself missing some of those pieces (like podcasts) to this day.
@Plex read this again and again.
The feature creep we have seen for years now has been mostly unwanted and only continued to bloat the app to the point which someone high up thought it was time to throw it all away and start fresh. What you should have done was slow the creep, remove features that weren’t being used, fixed bugs, and never, NEVER prioritized your own hosted streaming that NODODY wanted.
I would bet 99% of users on your app use it to organize and play their own curated content. Period. There are 1000 other streaming sites out there, even free ones, that we can find if we want that supplemental content. We don’t need this app bloated with yet another sub-par hosted streaming service that we just attempt to disable anyway.
Your Feature Suggestions thread is FULL of amazing ideas that could actually be useful and some have sat, stale, for YEARS while you insist on pushing more social features and streaming content. It’s extremely hard not to look at that and assume that you never have and never will care about the users. It’s all what the shareholders want. Maybe that’s wrong, but it’s what we see.
You also have lists a mile long of bugs that could be fixed, or little annoyances that could have been easily fixed and again, you prioritized new features that nobody asked for and we usually just disable.
There was as time when I really, truly, loved Plex. But in more recent years I have grown to tolerate it as there are not comparative alternatives. My thoughts keep wandering to, “How long do they have? Are they killing PMS soon? Do I need to find an alternative?” That is not good for business and it’s for sure not a good way to present yourself to your paying customers.
I would bet 99% of users on your app use it to organize and play their own curated content.
I’ll take that bet. I’ve got $1000 towards it. You name the escrow.
Edit: I’m betting against you, by the way.
That’s fair and you’re welcome to that opinion. I just don’t see any value in their streaming content. It’s b and c grade movies/tv with far too many ads. I tried to watch one 2 hour movie and it had the exact same 2-3 minutes of ads, in the wrong language, every 10-15 minutes. Absolute trash IMO. The core of plex, what it was built on, was organizing your own media (movies, tv, music, photos). It was never built for supplemental streaming that’s half baked.
It’s amazing how many people believe that EVERYONE uses Plex in exactly the same way they do.
It’s also amazing how many people don’t understand the technical reasons the new app was created. Maybe you should go and research this, and you’d understand WHY this course of action was taken.
Yes, the new app is substandard in many way and yes it was rushed out, I hate it’s current state myself and think that this should have been released alongside the previous app, but I’m sick of people moaning when they don’t know the background.
I am more than familiar with the technical reasons why they did it (standardized codebase and all) but that doesn’t change the fact that they rushed it out a year too soon. It also doesn’t change anything else I stated. It’s all true. They have had useless feature creep for years now and growing lists of completely ignored bugs and feature requests that mostly never come to light.
I have used plex since the osxbmc days, before the Plex rebrand even happened. Back then, and up until very recently, Plex was only used to manage local libraries of personal media. So yes, it’s pretty easy to assume that the vast majority of users who are upset, and have been for some time, primarily use it in that regard. Also I never stated that “everyone” uses it this way, I said that vast majority of users.
Only difference I would say is 99% of their users use the app to either play their own content OR other user’s content (not Plex’s content). As @SuperSecret said, there are tons of other options to watch Plex’s type of content (with a better experience).
How did you come up with the 99% number? M
It’s just an exaggerated speculation / figure of speech roughly meaning “most likely the majority of users” 
If personal media was more profitable, plex would focus on that. I think you are wrong and plex has more users/makes more money with the ad supported streaming, sad as that is. But I also made that up, so who knows, but it is supported by the actions plex is taking.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If personal media was more profitable, plex would focus on that
I think Plex has put their focus on things very few people care about, which are the things you mentioned - ad supported streaming.
But let’s not lump everyone into the same category. People that purchase Plex Pass are very likely MOSTLY interested in their own media, not watching ad-infused content.
“Civilians” that just want to watch a random movie that they can see on plex with ads are an entirely different group of users.
If they actually offered premium, ad-free content then streaming might be different. But they’re lumping all of us in one, big pool of users and it sucks. I have attempted watching a couple of different things the last year or two with media they were pushing, rather than my library and the experience sucked.
When Plex started, their primary goal was to help users to manage their own libraries. That’s what they were good at and that’s why I bought it.
Now their primary goal is to push ad-related content and it’s made my Plex experience so much worse. If viewing one’s private content is the goal, the user experience sucks because I have to get past all their crap first.
Watching their content can be done in 1-2 clicks. Watching my content takes 2-3 clicks. Dishonor on plex.
They don’t appear to have released user numbers for a while, but in January 2023 Plex announced it had 16 million monthly active users streaming billions of minutes of content. It had tripled its ad revenue over the previous year. That doesn’t sound like something very few people care about…. I think people really need to accept that exclusively using Plex to stream your own content is a minority use case.
Disable it all once and you never have to deal with it again. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any “Plex” content on any of my devices.
I hardly encountered any forum post from any of these users you tell us they form the majority of current users. Any idea why? Are these users not encountering bugs? Are these users not interested in new versions of Plex player software? Nobody complaining about ad frequency?
Where are these phantom users only interested in Plex streaming offer?
Are you suggesting Plex just made the numbers up?
I am not suggesting anything. I don’t know the numbers. I just watch forum activity. And I see that you don’t answer my questions.
I see that the online media section has 2 topics per week…
If you’re not suggesting anything what was the purpose of your questions then? The numbers are those that Plex gave out. What does the frequency (or not) of any of those users on the forums have to do with anything?
And no, I didn’t answer your questions as I have absolutely no idea why someone who uses the streaming offering may or may not want to visit the forum.
So what?
You were suggesting everybody needs to accept and agree to the above statement.
I just told you that the forum user numbers do not say the same.
You can tell here that I want the same as you… just add information to a discussion.
How do you figure that? The forum has a little over a million total registered users (over 7 years). It’s had 2.3k active users in the last week. Most topics, even those with significant number of views and replies, only have a maximum of a couple of hundred contributing users. And most of the time the majority of replies are from a significantly smaller number of users.
All the forum numbers demonstrate is that its only used by a very small amount of the total users Plex says it has. It doesn’t do anything to show that using Plex to exclusively stream your own content is not a minority use case.
The number of issues in the online media part of the forum is significantly smaller than in the other sections - and the number of participating users per topic is also smaller.
I don’t think that your conclusions are valid. I don’t want to change your opinion, but I think nobody “needs to really accept that exclusively using Plex to stream you own content is a minority use case” following these arguments.
And I have said all I wanted. You have the last word on it.
Thats very easily explained. The forum is biased towards tech nerds, personal media is biased towards tech news.
Forums are old school, “normal” people don’t use forums, they use instagram and Facebook. They don’t even own computers, they use phones. “normal” people also don’t hord their media, they use streaming services like netflix and plex. That is why, in a nerdy tech forum you are way more likely to discuss nerdy tech use cases, not use cases your boomer mom has.
