Value proposition of Plex Pass & Looking back at the blog post that launched Plex Pass

General Discussions
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Hi Plex team and fellow Plex Pass members,

I want to start up a discussion about the value proposition of Plex Pass and my experience thus far. Yes there will be little tears but also a huge thanks to the Plex employees who work tirelessly on this awesome platform.

So the background
Plex kills/killed XBMC. The fact that it had server side data of what has/hasnt been watched and managing all that centrally was the biggest thing that got me across to Plex so many years ago. I have loved using Plex for so many years.

Plex Pass Announcement
When this was announced I was ready to hit the buy button for the Lifetime sub, but I didnt. I looked at the benefits touted by the blog post:

  1. First of all, PlexPass gets you early access to new features. We’ll be making select new features available to PlexPass members earlier than we otherwise would, and you’ll get to play with them and give us feedback and suggestions. Make your friends jealous. (And yes, we have a juicy new feature to get this kicked off in style.)

  2. We’re going to be introducing some premium features. Fancy, shiny things with lots of sparkle (and not the sort that comes with fangs and neck affinity). As a PlexPass member, you’ll get free access to those features while we’re testing them out.

  3. PlexPass members automatically get access to private forums for discussing these new features. There’s another forum for voting on bugs & features to help us with prioritization. And there is another one we’re calling for people needing a bit of extra help with issues they may be running into. Hey, you’re a PlexPass member – we’ll give you some extra love!

  4. Last, but not least, PlexPass members get discounts on premium features once they’re made available to the general public.

Then read across many forums on the web who simply said Plex Pass members are paying to be Beta testers. I kind of agreed. Fast forward a couple of years and I pulled out the wallet and paid up thanks to a nice discount promotion. I thought, these guys/gals are working so hard they deserve the money to pay their wages which is absolutely correct.

Having used Plex Pass for a bit…
Extras are awesome, love the ability to see Actor interviews. Trailers is definitely a nice touch and I really started to use Mobile Sync as I was travelling a fair bit this year (albeit a bit buggy).

Value Proposition #3 - Support…

  1. PlexPass members automatically get access to private forums for discussing these new features. There’s another forum for voting on bugs & features to help us with prioritization. And there is another one we’re calling for people needing a bit of extra help with issues they may be running into. Hey, you’re a PlexPass member – we’ll give you some extra love!

So here lies the first problem. I have striked out the benefit that I really needed and wanted. . As you can see from that link im struggling with PMS (plex pass release) and Apple TV 4th Gen App and getting no love (poor me) with some help as to what could possibly be going wrong. As you can see, I simply posted it in the General Discussion section as there is no “Extra Help with Issues” forum as promised.

Getting back to Basics
This is entirely my gut talking here, so flame away if required.

In my opinion (having stalked the forums for a bit), the majority of threads/support topics have 0 comments and barely any support. So many people are having issues with Plex (as you would expect with a huge ramp up in new users), but my gut tells me this is because every new Blog post from the Devs (and the lovely Barkley for that matter) are about totally new features. This is why getting back to basics is really important now.

I understand Plex has to keep fresh and innovate alongside selling itself that it supports such a wide range of devices. I think this is the exact problem. Plex employees are spreading themselves so thin developing across so many devices that the basics are starting to drop, that is with Video streaming/transcoding issues popping up everywhere. I bet if we asked every Plex Pass member, do you want 100x features, or do you want 10x that work flawlessly. I mean at the end of the day, Music, Photos, Trailers, mobile sync, auto photo tagging, DVR, cloud sync, mood mix, plex mix, multiple users, camera upload are all lovely features. But I would take simple flawless execution of video (movies/TV) streaming/transcoding over any of the above.

So to recap my thoughts: (TLDR)

  1. Implement Plex Pass Support Forum
  2. Halt on new features (the list is already extensive) and focus on stabilising all the platforms (and potentially kill some off that have low usage)

Over to you, how are you finding Plex Pass and its Value Proposition? Also would love to hear from Plex as my gut might totally be out of line.

Cheers from Australia,
katz

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I really appreciated your super-thoughtful post.

I feel bad replying so briefly given your extensive and well-written thoughts, but we’ve definitely had internal conversations around (a) being better about seeing features through beyond just the initial release (b) being better about saying “no” and © making sure fixes are prioritized appropriately. I think that with our history of having come from a “nights and weekends” background, these things (or at least the first and second) are perhaps slightly more challenging than, say, if we came out of nowhere with a single-minded focus on sharing cat videos (and only cat videos, our AI to detect cats is the best. Very impressive!).

As we joke about a lot, Plex is a fractal platform ~ you can zoom into any small piece of it and explore it for a lifetime.

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To be honest, I find the managed user feature the only thing I care about. I just started to use the trailers but find that useless too because trailers have always sucked and never show the essence of the movie.
On a side note though, I really would like to see Academy Awards for trailers. They edit them so damn good to pull you in…Only to find the movie sucked…

Anyhow. I don’t like any of the other features and find it really hard to encourage people to buy a PlexPass membership because I don’t see these features usefulness.

[Plex Home]… Still not 100% sure if this is a good thing. Seems like alot of trust is needed.
[Premium Music Libraries]… I own zero music…
[Mobile Sync]… I own a crappy phone with 1GB space and no SDslot. No other devices…
[Cloud Sync]… When I’m not home… MY computer is my cloud. And I don’t have to worry about some online TOS.
[Camera Upload]… I own zero pictures.
[Early Access]… I never install the latest and greatest. Heck, I’m still on PMS 1.0.2.2413.
[Member-Only Forums]… This is cool… Although, I believe there should be sub-sections within this. PlexPass General Questions and ones that are specific to the features…
[Free Access to Plex Apps]… I own only one andriod phone. Well, and one Roku…
[DVR]… Really? Sounds nice… Too bad it requires hardware…Oh well…

And I know I don’t speak for everyone. This is only my 2cents…

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@elan said:
I really appreciated your super-thoughtful post.

I feel bad replying so briefly given your extensive and well-written thoughts, but we’ve definitely had internal conversations around (a) being better about seeing features through beyond just the initial release (b) being better about saying “no” and (c) making sure fixes are prioritized appropriately. I think that with our history of having come from a “nights and weekends” background, these things (or at least the first and second) are perhaps slightly more challenging than, say, if we came out of nowhere with a single-minded focus on sharing cat videos (and only cat videos, our AI to detect cats is the best. Very impressive!).

As we joke about a lot, Plex is a fractal platform ~ you can zoom into any small piece of it and explore it for a lifetime.

This sounds positive, I love Plex and happy to pay to support the development. However, as you know 2016 does seem to have been release as many new features and products as possible while leaving other stuff half baked. My wishlist for where resource is as follows:

Resource split: 70% fixing what isn’t working well and implementing what are deemed important missing features // 30% on being creative… the latter is important otherwise plex would die as a business.

Of the 70%:

1 - Add subtile timing offset - personally of no benefit to me, but there’s a lot of people out there who would benefit so much for this. I’ve downloaded subs for future proof (hopefully never needed) and when I’ve tried it some subs are out by a good few seconds… This really should be top of the list by a long shot.

2 - Sort out PMP - its now gone public and the public version is worse than ever from what I see on the forums. This cake has been baking for far too long… you need to turn the oven up and serve something that would get you onto the next series of Bake Off (a UK TV show)

3 - Collections - The current implementation just doesn’t work. There’s plenty of threads on this so no need to go into detail

4 - Improve the way you understand what your customer base wants - from previous discussions, the current basis is totally floored. Something as simple as a twice yearly survey to all registered email addresses would give you far more insight than forums or personal opinion. Additionally the Feature Request forum just doesn’t work. People don’t understand that the official way to vote is to ‘like’

5 - Create a proper BETA closed group of testers - a group that you properly interact with and keep it totally private under an NDA. And aligned to this, don’t go singing and dancing about new betas until they are actually in a state to release and the cake is fully baked and ready to eat!! Listen to your beta testers, devs have a very different view of what the functionality should be over an end user. Use this beta group for proper QA too being release to pass and then the public!!!

Under the 30% of being creative:

1 - Look into tiered levels of subscription to give access to platinum featured

2 - under the above, work on including a custom player in each app which includes a full set of codec to improve direct playing. I would pay for a platinum sub for such a feature.

3 - add more customisable features like resizing posters so that you can increase from 2 rows of 6 to 3 rows of 8. Things like this make a massive difference

Just some ideas. I’m sure I’ll get shot down by all but hey, its xmas!!!

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@elan said:
I really appreciated your super-thoughtful post.

I feel bad replying so briefly given your extensive and well-written thoughts, but we’ve definitely had internal conversations around (a) being better about seeing features through beyond just the initial release (b) being better about saying “no” and (c) making sure fixes are prioritized appropriately. I think that with our history of having come from a “nights and weekends” background, these things (or at least the first and second) are perhaps slightly more challenging than, say, if we came out of nowhere with a single-minded focus on sharing cat videos (and only cat videos, our AI to detect cats is the best. Very impressive!).

As we joke about a lot, Plex is a fractal platform ~ you can zoom into any small piece of it and explore it for a lifetime.

Thanks elan for responding. I truly appreciate you chiming in. Didn’t really want it to come across negative so I hope it’s just food for thought for you and the team. I still love and absolutely use plex every day, actually it’s the wife and little one that use it daily :wink:

Would love to know your thoughts elan on bringing back/implementing the PP support forum? Sorry I’m not sure if it was there back when PP was launched, but it definitely isn’t here now from what I can see.

@reddwarfcrew said:
My wishlist for where resource is as follows:

Resource split: 70% fixing what isn’t working well and implementing what are deemed important missing features // 30% on being creative… the latter is important otherwise plex would die as a business.

I really like the idea of this in order to stabilise all the platforms. And of that 70% there needs to be a support function (which would be less required as that 70% would be stopping the bugs before people encounter them, if that makes sense)

@reddwarfcrew said:
Just some ideas. I’m sure I’ll get shot down by all but hey, its xmas!!!

Totally agree, I actually pondered before posting this thread, as it was literally a couple of days before XMAS. But hey it is XMAS soon!

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@katz said:
Would love to know your thoughts elan on bringing back/implementing the PP support forum? Sorry I’m not sure if it was there back when PP was launched, but it definitely isn’t here now from what I can see.

I believe this was referred to as the “Ask a Ninja” forum, but we ended up (IIRC) merging it with this general one, not least because people were asking questions in both places.

I’d love to be able to provide much improved support for our users, in some shape or form. Right now the basic fact is that the ratio of employees to users (and even Plex Pass holders) is giant, and we just don’t have the resources to provide the 1:1 sort of help. We are working with the support team on some improvements, but I don’t have anything specific to announce just yet (but know that we want to do better, and are actively discussing possible approaches).

@reddwarfcrew said:
Resource split: 70% fixing what isn’t working well and implementing what are deemed important missing features // 30% on being creative

There’s definitely a resource split which is needed, and we’re in agreement we need to increase the % spent on maintenance, but I think the 70:30 ratio is fairly extreme, unless we were IBM or something like that :slight_smile:

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That gives me great confidence Elan that you’re looking at it. Thanks, that’s great to hear

Agree the 70/30 split is aggressive haha

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@NewPlaza said:
Anyhow. I don’t like any of the other features and find it really hard to encourage people to buy a PlexPass membership because I don’t see these features usefulness.

[Plex Home]… Still not 100% sure if this is a good thing. Seems like alot of trust is needed.

This was my top “must have” request in the past, and I am thrilled to have parental controls. Now I’m not worried about my daughter getting nightmares just by seeing scary looking movie covers.

[Premium Music Libraries]… I own zero music…

I’m impressed with how Plex has improved on the music handling. I especially love it with:

[Mobile Sync]… I own a crappy phone with 1GB space and no SDslot. No other devices…

This is my most heavily used Plexpass feature. I sync my music playlists to my phone so I’m not using up data on my cellular network. When I add music to the playlists, they automatically sync to my phone. I love that the TV shows I’m watching will do self maintenance by removing the watched copies and download the new ones when I’m back on a WiFi network.

[Cloud Sync]… When I’m not home… MY computer is my cloud. And I don’t have to worry about some online TOS.

I really don’t use this one either, but others might have limited space on their devices. I’m glad this feature is around for them.

[Camera Upload]… I own zero pictures.

This is pretty friggin’ handy for me, especially now I don’t have to bug my wife to plug in her phone to sync our photos. It just uploads and I can organize them later.

[Early Access]… I never install the latest and greatest. Heck, I’m still on PMS 1.0.2.2413.

I lost this when DVR went on a different Beta release. I hope they combine them soon.

[Member-Only Forums]… This is cool… Although, I believe there should be sub-sections within this. PlexPass General Questions and ones that are specific to the features…

I probably visit here more often than the regular forums.

[Free Access to Plex Apps]… I own only one andriod phone. Well, and one Roku…

Still better than the $5 it used to cost, per platform.

[DVR]… Really? Sounds nice… Too bad it requires hardware…Oh well…

I lucked out on this one, I already owned one. I’m using the Plex DVR more than I really thought I would when it was announced.

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@elan said:
There’s definitely a resource split which is needed, and we’re in agreement we need to increase the % spent on maintenance, but I think the 70:30 ratio is fairly extreme, unless we were IBM or something like that :slight_smile:

Totally agree that 70/30 is extreme, but that does reflect the nature of how much maintenance is needed. Don’t forget, the quicker you sort all the half baked cakes, the quicker you can start to move that ratio.

Once you have the current portfolio sorted you can reduce the 70, infact it could end up 30/70. It’s a very short term burst of effort to get the current portfolio properly working.

Just remember, as you have eluded to yourself, change your approach to see features through beyond initial release and the ratio of ‘fixing’ resource will always be low… you just need to do that initial burst of focus.

Make Q1 2017 a new product launch/dev free zone and then you’ll find you suddenly have far more resource going forward for new builds and the ‘fun and creative’ stuff.

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Spot on Red. We recently did that at work (core banking platform replacement) and instead of implementing change requests for new features we focussed one whole month of the dev team to purely stabilising the platform through defect fixes and incident root cause investigation. It worked wonders.

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I would like to see a return of many of the pass only features that went away faster than they arrived

I would like to see plex pass users getting REAL extra features not availabe in the free version… and not limited to bug ridden betaware that we become the testers for… but actual… tested and stable features that never migrate to the free users…

right now plex pass users are employees paying to work…

and many of the pass only features just dont work…

and after months… trailers playback still does not work correctly if you have multiple quality versions of movies while using the ‘play version’ button or the ios app equivelent…

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Unfortunately Plex has got stuck with giving away for free what is sufficient for 90% of their customer base & so scrabbles around to find extra facilities that can justify a fee. It’s a frequent comment on these forums that someone has purchased Plex Pass because the developers deserve some recompense for their work rather than the user absolutely requires a particular Plex Pass feature. It’s probably too late now as changing the business model would piss off all the freeloaders but charging a decent one-off price or subscription for Plex Server itself & then providing proper support would have been a far more satisfactory solution.

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Support definitely is a theme here. Thanks for chiming in everyone, it’s great we can share our feedback (both positive and negative) to ultimately improve the best media player.

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Hey elan, any updates on how things are progressing? We would love to know.

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@nigelpb said:
Unfortunately Plex has got stuck with giving away for free what is sufficient for 90% of their customer base & so scrabbles around to find extra facilities that can justify a fee. It’s a frequent comment on these forums that someone has purchased Plex Pass because the developers deserve some recompense for their work rather than the user absolutely requires a particular Plex Pass feature. It’s probably too late now as changing the business model would piss off all the freeloaders but charging a decent one-off price or subscription for Plex Server itself & then providing proper support would have been a far more satisfactory solution.

If this were my company, I’d make the currently in beta hardware accelerated Transcoding a Plexpass feature. Get people to use the server as they currently are, and when their use case/sharing increases, they’ll need this and start paying.

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…any updates? With the release of the super “cool feature that everyone wanted” …news. I’m starting to wonder what’s going on here. Elan, what’s he strategic focus for you and the team? What do you want plex to be in 1 and 3 years time?