I understand your point, but it’s the hard truth and people need to hear it even if they don’t want to. A price fluctuation of 15¢/gal is enough to make a tank of gas $2 more expensive. How often do you see the price of gas change in your area?
Plex is an entertainment service. If they can’t afford this small fee they will be royally screwed by a dozen other things just as easily. Just do without Plex remote access, watch the Plex Ad-Supported Content when you’re away from home (or Pluto, Tubi, or some other free service for entertainment), get your ducks in a row with your finances. Or you can explore free ways to enabling remote access to your server. Those exist. Is your effort to learn worth $2?
I do think plex has a choice to offload the cost of certs and other things to the pms admins to take care of in their own infrastructure other self hosting platforms do this. Well $2 a month is hardly burdensome it is a self motivated decision by plex to not offer alternatives within their platform.
In the end someone’s got to pay. Be it the pms admin or plex. Users leech that’s a fact, but I guess as a admin you have to decide ultimately if you want to support plex or not and if that cost exceeds the lifetime pass.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the TOS are there and comply whole heartedly, but I see it as me lending my DVD/VHS/CD’s to my friends and family virtually.
But it does seem a little sus to me that rather than charging a fee to access the media Plex themselves are sharing (via the “Pluto” model) they are choosing to charge people to access someone else’s media that they don’t host, have purchased or pay royalties to stream.
What is the maximum number of authorized users? Is there a difference between Pass users and free users? How many people can I authorize to access my library and watch my content?
They are charging a fee – watching advertising. And if they did charge a monetary fee you would complain about having to pay and still look at ads. That’s why lots of us are here to begin with – traditional streaming services wanting to double-dip on revenue for the same content. The fee for the remote access is for keeping track of/reaching personal servers on the larger internet, and the Plex FAST service isn’t streamed from a person’s private server to start with, so that infrastructure is not used.
Back to that $2 fee being so burdensome, I wonder how much the electricity to run that Plex server costs. If you’re making it available remotely that likely means it’s on 24/7 too (I have heard of people who only use their server when home, who shut the machine off when they are gone).
Yeah as connections to tcp can be done free and the infrastructure and content is what we host it’s kinda a back hand. If it was free remote if your the pms admin account with or without plex pass I could stomach that better because we do incur a cost to run a server. If it’s other leechy users sure subscribe away.
I think what will happen is pms admins will just defer the cost of a lifetime pass in some way on to their users even if against tos to umbrella everyone.
It highly depends on your hydro cost and the equipment you use. It can get pricy being on 24/7. Plus you have to pay for internet speeds that can handle multiple connections.
I get what you’re saying and don’t disagree. I’m not complaining about any of that. I don’t watch their content so the “advertisements” aren’t costing me a thing nor would the $2 fee you keep bring up since as you say “I wonder how much the electricity to run that Plex server costs. If you’re making it available remotely that likely means it’s on 24/7 too” that’s my choice.
But you fail to see the point I’m making, If I hand my DVD collection of BTVS to my friend the DVD player they are watching it on doesn’t get to charge them to watch it. They paid for that DVD player already. Fox doesn’t get to then charge them to view it either, but with Plex charging a fee (even a burdensome $2) to my friend to watch it seems a little bit off.
I’m not saying they are wrong for getting paid for providing a service I just think it’s funny that if I take money from someone to watch my media on my Plex server I can be banned for breach of TOS but they can do it and I shouldn’t have even a side eye about it?
The fee doesn’t really discriminate based on the source of the local content, so not sure the Fox DVD is a good example. You could be serving up your hang-gliding GoPro adventures or a self-made seminar on avoiding $2 subscription plans. Perhaps you should choose to think of this as just a small fee to support Plex as a continued development effort. Even if you don’t want anything to change and for the whole product to be in “maintenance mode” the rest of the world is not standing still. Apps will cease to function due to changes to streaming devices or server OSes, besides normal new bugs found.
As I mentioned before, there are ways of enabling remote usage that do not use Plex’s services. Plex isn’t going to help you implement them, because that puts them on the spot to support those methods. Support some have already voiced an unwillingness to pay for.
It does. Unless users are connecting directly via the https://yourserver:32400 and that would only apply to home users or the direct pms account. Either way your still connecting via plex’s authentication servers unless you’ve opened up plex to be accessed completely unauthorized the way you can over lan.
I agree to some extent. Their are many open source devs that do this freely or by donation, but due to the infrastructure costs that’s where things change. Plex is also a business and employes devs so that’s where the pay to play model needs to come in.
Plex can go get the support fee all they want! More power to them, but Plex isn’t developing anything currently (IMO) that is for the self hosted owner, they are developing for the Media Hub Content Consumer. The things that seemed to be for those of us that wanted this only for viewing our own media have been shelved or removed in favor of the Streaming Media Customer. I paid for my Lifetime Plex Pass to host my own media and to view that specific content my way. If I like a function they add I use it if I don’t want it I remove it from my servers view.
I noticed you avoid the topic that if I do what Plex themselves are implementing ie: charging a small fee for services and upkeep (you say apps and bugs, I say hard drive maintenance, IP costs and electricity for my server) I would be banned from using their service. They are charging for remote access to my content, not theirs and it does seem to be a contradiction IMO.
Could I suggest that someone from Plex suggest getting some professional community engagement in to help when making significant changes to licensing. This thread was entirely expected and should be a great learning experience.
A few more points:
1 - The aggression here is dissapointing, especially from Plex Staff. Just no need for it.
2 - If it is true that a Plex employee shared non public information about one or more Plex customers, this is absolutely unacceptable. This needs to be reviewed by Plex and then we need a public comment to ensure that your loyal customer base understand what happened and what you will do to ensure it never happens again. Many folks trust Plex with some fairly sensitive information (especially around personal media), I’m not sure where my trust is right now until further information is available.
3 - Perhaps consider been specific in your communications rather than “got a ton of exciting things to roll out, with even more in the planning stages”, you need to bring a carrot and a stick to such discussions.
4 - Please can some effort be put into fixing long standing stability (example crashing on iOS/iPadOS), performance (especially with Downloads) and basic feature availability (PiP on desktops or stage manager for iPadOS). Fingers crossed that the New Plex Experience will sort that (sadly by the time I found out about this the Beta was full).
I’m sure for most of us who have Plex Passes, our journey started with using the free product, let’s hope for the continued health of Plex that new users discover Plex and are excited enough to pay for it.
For me, I wanted sync to be able to download content and iPad support. So I purchased a Plex Pass, only to find that sync was useless in most cases and the download feature that replaced it is also in need of some love, further that the iPadOS version of Plex is so unstable I’m still paying for another media playback app to be able to watch content. Hoping that my Plex Pass is of value to me sometime soon as the clients improve with all of this focus and “a ton of exciting new” whatever’s are coming.
Honestly aggression has always been a little touch and go on these forums. It’s a weird place in one respect if your seeking help you’ll probably get a dev on another hand if you were expecting community user support it’s not as likely or if answers are not in scope of plex it can be met with hostility (depending on the question). Certainly plex has room to improve it’s not perfect, but I respect the platform for trying.
People in the Apple TV player beta update thread would be interested to hear this. A new player engine that is for stuttering that only happens with their personal high-bitrate content. Not Plex FAST programming.
Because access by people who are not you is a legal grey area to begin with. Your DVD purchase was a sale of a license to you for playback. In your own home clearly other immediate family members will see it, too. If you loan a DVD to an outside family member you are depriving yourself of the access to the DVD during that time. There is only one copy of the content. Meanwhile you can have a half-dozen people watching the same movie (in different places geographically and in the content’s playback) with a media server. It’s too easy for this to extend into a commercial venture by receiving money for the access. If the server is run entirely by you, with you shouldering the costs, this goes away. Just like one of the major linchpins in copyright infringement cases is whether the defendant personally benefited from the infringement [7 U.S.C. § 506(a)]
Making receiving payment for access against the ToS is how Plex tries to lessen their legal venerability as being seen as a contributor. The remote access fee is not an enabler of copyright infringement because it is a cost of making the server remotely available and applies to the owner as well, who has the legal right to the presentation of the content.
And if they did charge a monetary fee you would complain about having to pay and still look at ads. That’s why lots of us are here to begin with – traditional streaming services wanting to double-dip on revenue for the same content. The fee for the remote access is for keeping track of/reaching personal servers on the larger internet, and the Plex FAST service isn’t streamed from a person’s private server to start with, so that infrastructure is not used.