They have added more to this prior announcement.
Discover is an edict from CEO Keith directly, after Plex,inc took PE investment from Intercap and Intercap getting Board seats. The only goal of that investment is to turn Plex,inc into a social media platform.
CTO isn’t able to overrule CEO and the Board so it’s wise for him to remain silent. Especially if the EU levies the maximum fine (which I am hoping happens).
Edit: I hope there is no D&O policy and Plex,inc needs to cover the max fine out of the balance sheet.
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They’re gonna lose about 90% of their customers if they continue, people will simply move to the competition.
The current CEO will tank the entire company, sometimes I wonder how brain damaged people get into these positions. (See what happened with Unity)
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Because of this…
I can’t share my content with my aunt’s managed users, so she lets two 5-year-old twin boys use her account to watch their cartoons in their bedroom
I can’t share share with my sister’s kids because they don’t have a Plex pass and can’t be included in a “Plex Home” on their main account. Which means completely giving away their parental controls if I give the kids their own user accounts (created with an email)
Kids have access to community rooms like a living room TV anyway
I shouldn’t have to treat my episodes of Gilligan’s Island like a gun, locked in safe on the top shelf in the closet
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That Plex is trying to brute-force us into a social media platform via some charlatan-level user interface shenanigans is a really dumb hill, but apparently this is the hill Plex wants to die on.
They have certainly crossed a threshold here that will garner deeper looks from legal authorities, so good luck with all of that! But in the interim, this weekend is as good a time as any to dust off our dear old friend, Mr. Jellyfin, to take him for a spin. Let the good time roll!
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Every Plex comment on this:
Nooooo it is opt in!
That post:
Continuing the discussion from Discover Together: Public Release:
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The beauty of Plex as an org is how hard they push the value of lifetime. They already have the lifetime money from many server hosts in this thread so this honestly gives them an opportunity to push out dinosaur users who don’t want this (who already paid them) and use social features to bring in new users at higher prices and worse deals.
If you’re a customer who doesn’t want to be involved in their data harvest and resell and works around the clock to reduce the amount of data they get plus you’re not giving them any new money it is unfortunately a win win for them, lose lose for us.
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AFAIK, in the EU, pre-selected choices cannot be the non-private ones.
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I fear you are right, all protests here have fallen on deaf ears in Plex corporate.
Plex Inc are not going to change course, and we can only expect more of the same or worse in the future.
I continued to pay for annual plex pass rather than pay the one off lifetime license, and I did this since I wanted to support a great product. I paid for 11yrs since the launch of the Plex pass, and this for me felt better to support Plex Inc over the long term.
For a large proportion of users they have a lifetime pass, Plex Inc already has your money so there is little to lose from alienating some of that userbase.
For me, these events mean I’ve cancelled by Plex pass subscription and I’m sunsetting our use of Plex. Cancelling is not about trying to force Plex to change course, that ship has sailed and they need customers who are willing to give their data so Plex can sell that to survive.
Legacy customers like me can’t always be supported or accommodated for the companies best interests to be served. It’s deeply sad, but also true.
The events have forced me to review the alternatives and Plex has now been replaced with JellyFin for the server side and Infuse on the clients for AppleTV/iPad. The SwiftFin client is a little buggy, but Infuse is close to flawless.
Infuse has now got my Plex money with a $10/yr annual subscription.
Plex… So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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“a little buggy”, that’s being extremely over generous.
i said it earlier in this thread, but it’s dogshit. Jelly has a decent server app, but the client apps (outwith android) are embarrassing.
if it wasn’t for the jellyfin clients i’d have completely moved to jellyfin a long time ago.
infuse is fine but it doesn’t have the granular benefits that a first party app has.
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I’m not saying this isn’t part of their motivation, but there may be a problem with that
For everyone 1 admin with a Plex pass, there might be 3, or 5, or 10…or more people that only use Plex because of that one person
In my case, nobody connected to my server uses it for their own media. It’s my stuff or the free stuff Plex has
Of course I don’t know, but I have to assume it’s the people without their own content that are more likely to use the ad-supported live tv, free on demand content which Plex is relying on to bring in the bulk of their cashflow
Their ad-supported content was supposed to be the savior and I kept hearing how this was now making up a majority of the money the company was bringing in and how successful it was
That was the last thing I heard before they fired 20% of their staff because of financial problems anyway
From the outside it looks like the guys on top are stuffing their pockets with cash and the employees are being forced to implement the exact things that will make their jobs obsolete
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Terminate all lifetime passes. Easy solution. The people you alienate by doing this obviously wouldn’t be earning you any money anyway. Then the people that stay will provide a regular revenue stream.
I’m not defending this stupid email and privacy violation, but if the self-hosted server owners would be paying Plex more, they would be seeking fewer…creative solutions to their shortfalls.
Honestly Id be happy to pay a slightly discounted ongoing subscription - if its stopped all this BS. As I’ve said in other threads - lifetime (in its current state) was doomed to fail.
But that ship has sailed now - its very unlikely plex management are going to turn back and will stick with the current plans.
I think until we start seeing really good apps pop up on another platform - alot of users might be stuck and just deal with it.
I believe - if JF had apps that could rival Plex (honestly even if the inteface was smooth / playback was good and features for parity slowly made there way in) - most users would jump ship.
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This is one of the DUMBEST decisions I’ve seen from Plex. If I want social media / social connections, I’ll go to Facebook or twitter. Sharing “watched” history is f’ing creepy. No one asked for this BS. No one wants it. I don’t want to feel “watched” with my own server on my own hardware with my own friend circle. IF the product was free, I can see an argument. It’s embarrassing having to tell friends and family to go to certain places in the client to ensure I (ME) don’t see what THEY have watched.
Plex devs- get it together. I’m a huge proponent of Plex, but I’ve installed Emby and I’ll be walking my family through converting. I refuse to subject my family to this nonsense.
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I enjoy the fact that Plex is doubling down on being a data mining company and possibly causing serious mental health issues for a small sub set of its users by outing their watching habits instead of apologizing and flicking the switch from opt out to opt in.
That seed money must be unreal considering every employee at Plex is willing to shill this privacy destroying decision.
The best part of this irony? We gave them our money just to get our privacy raped.
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Well people signed up to the beta so obviously that’s not the case. Now it may be that a significant chunk of people don’t want it/aren’t interested in it, but that’s a far cry from no one wanting it.
I hate to break it to you, but if you’re running a server then you’ve been collecting data on what your friends and family have been watching on it for a long time now. And you’ll continue to be doing that even if you switch to Emby or Jellyfin.
There not collecting anything new as a result of Discover Together. All that’s changed now is that was already being collected (depending on your use of certain other features) might now get shared with ‘friends’. If you’re bothered about Plex collecting data now then you should’ve been equally bothered about it many many months ago.
Are we talking about users watching stuff from Plex’s own offerings or adding items they’ve watched outside of Plex to a watchlist here? I’m not really seeing how someone could be ousted otherwise (unless, I suppose, they have a server, share certain items on it with other people, but have other unshared items they don’t want anyone to know they watch).
how are you comparing that to what plex just did and is doubling down on lol
the information i told plex to ■■■■ off already ant not collect and did it anyways lol
because clearly you have plex coloured lenses on and cant see how this can happen, theres several examples already including on reddit where a user went through some embarassing moments just explaining the title of a kardashians episode.
how are you shilling this hard for a data mining corp that no one gave their money to under these circumstances? lol
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As a long time user, this is my first time posting just to say that please kill this stupid feature.
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Because for the friends and family members who’s watch history ends up being told to the server admin it’s the same thing? If you run a server then information about what is being watched on that server is already being collected by you. That you may choose to not look at it doesn’t mean it’s not being collected. There’s nothing people sharing your server can do to stop you being able to see what they’re watching on your server. Pretending otherwise is ridiculous.
What information was this?
Hang about, I thought we were talking about serious mental health issues. Being embarrassed about watching the Kardashians (while not ideal) isn’t really a serious mental health issue is it?
i dont even know to being with this stupidity
you must be great at doing the twist cause man all you do is turn around and twist around peoples words into nonsense this entire thread. keep on shilling for plex bro, enjoyin your PERSONAL media server getting creeped on 24/7
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