It’s still hilarious to me that Plex, a project forked from the XBMC (now Kodi) free open-source app for organizing and playing one’s own entirely legally obtained video files, is a big streaming business thing that charges people money.
It’s like finding a tree in the forest that gives out infinite free apples, and then setting up an apple-selling table right next to it stocked with apples you obviously got from that tree.
This happens all the time in FOSS
Someone comes in, contributes a bit, then forks, then closes it off once they realize there’s a path to monetization.
Plex is a particularly egregious example: the initial author forked xbmc to make a mac port. This led to a crazy amount of popularity very fast and they saw the path to monetization. They soon after created plex server separate from the client and went to the crazy step of rewriting everything GPL so they could fully close source.
This is legally fine but ethically fucked; they had a derivative app that technically no longer shared code with kodi but there was the fact that design cues, data structures, etc were mostly inherited. Plex wouldn’t exist without kodi. And that’s totally fine, derivative works should be allowed and encouraged. But what’s fucked is that they made serious efforts to close source and give nothing back to the community that they were built from. Code? Nothing. When they got 40 million in VC? nothing.
See also a bunch of players in 3d printing, notably Bambu at the moment. But they’ll keep getting away with it thanks to a combination of governments that are like “money is more important than fairness or progress” and idiotic consumers that are like “oh I have to spend 30 seconds longer figuring something out? Ugh fuck you im gonna buy what some YouTuber was paid $400 to recommend”
No… it’s like picking up those apples, shipping them across the country, and then charging customers a delivery fee. Which is perfectly reasonable because time and fuel cost money.
Plex helps you (and others) stream from your library pretty brainlessly. Sure there are other options, but all of them are more complicated.
This is it. People have always paid for convenience.
Just look at console vs PC gaming.
Steamdeck made Linux gaming mainstream because it’s brainless. Backed by proton.
But console has a vice grip on some communities / groups due to a long standing “plug and play” sales pitch. Now they’re stuck because “my friends are there.”
My brother-in-law is a sysadmin and stuck on Playstation due to his friends. Doesn’t even own a gaming PC because “he doesn’t have the time to tinker.”
Technically, it’s like facilitating the shipping of those apples, but leaving the customer to ship.
Plex server->client streams don’t go through Plex’s servers themselves, but directly from server to clients. P2P. AFAIK the only exception is when something goes wrong and it falls back to a Plex-hosted server as an intermediary, which should be rare.
That’s still a pretty useful service though. Getting P2P reliable and easy isn’t trivial, and is one reason why open source projects haven’t really supplanted it yet.
Couldn’t pay me to use that software lol
Used Kodi and now using Jellyfin.
This is almost certainly a ploy to get an influx of buyers before the cutoff of July.
They want to round up all the people that they think were considering a lifetime pass, but were holding out.
I guarantee you when July comes they’re going to reduce the cost to somewhere less than $750 and much closer to the current price due to “we listen to our customers” when really it was the plan all along.
They’re using the Decoy Effect and FOMO.
Or maybe they want monthly/annual/whatever subscribers, not lifetime, and so they’re making the lifetime pass prohibitively expensive. I have a lifetime pass I purchased a few years ago but after running Jellyfin alongside Plex for a few months, I don’t think I could recommend Plex to anyone who simply wants to host their own media.
Jellyfin Lifetime Pass continues to be better value.
I heard their quadrupling their lifetime membership.
Oh bugger, I might actually have to start still paying nothing
Jellyfin: free Cloudflared: free
Jellyfin behind Cloudflared is probably the best move ATM.
It’s not specifically against TOS, they do provide you some modest protection against infiltration.
combine that with running it from a container with RO access to your media and you have a damn nice home solution.
While Cloudflare tunnels do work, streaming Jellyfin through them is technically against their TOS and they could shut you down for doing so. Instead, I recommend setting up Pangolin with a cheap VPS. Although, it will cost ~$5 a month or so.
You don’t have to use a tunnel, for example I use a reverse proxy to a domain I own, and set a cache rule so cloudflare doesn’t get mad.
I really need to take a weekend to learn Jellyfin and set it up in my environment.
Duckdns is free too
I have a static IP (didn’t particularly want it but my ISP required it for port forwarding for some reason). I’m not currently hosting anything, at least not anything externally accessible, but when I did I had a tiny AWS instance configured as a reverse proxy to a separate reverse proxy VM in my house. It worked for me and if anything I hosted ever got compromised it escaped my notice.
However, I think the advantage of using something like Cloudflare rather than the way I did it (and as it sounds like you might) is threat mitigation. Especially stuff like DDoS protection.
I think software subscriptions are a scam, but I don’t mind buying a perpetual license that is only good up to a certain version with additional fees for newer versions. It’s also fair to charge a recurring fee for something that has recurring hosting costs like a VPN, cloud storage, etc.
If they weren’t such dipshits, the “lifetime pass” should have been a perpetual license you can keep using as long as you want, but charge an optional fee for newer versions if you want to upgrade and get more features. They should also have offered a hosted service to make your instance available to others and charge a monthly fee for that. I think people would’ve been fine with all that.
I’ve always thought the licensing for Jetbrains IDEs is a pretty fair way of licensing software. If you stop subscribing you still get access to the last version of the software you paid for but you don’t get new versions anymore. And if you stay subscribed you get a loyalty discount after your first and second years. So it provides an incentive to stay subscribed long term but if you do leave you still get access perpetually to the last version you bought
I think thats really fair too. I might adopt that for my startup.
I use a package at work that lets you update within the major version. So you won’t get the bells and whistles of the new one, but you’ll get security updates and big fixes for 2 years or so. After that, you’re using a mature and polished product that you can ride another 10 years if you want.
Well I don’t like seeing well reasoned, thoughtful comments in my hate thread. We are supposed to be kicking them while they’re down! Not pointing out how a small change would ameliorate the issue and fix everything!
Nothing can ameliorate the ineptitude of
Principal SkinnerPlex.
I think part of the issue with moving from physical media as a form of software distribution is that people ship buggy software all the time. In addition to making more money via subscription, the company can ship updates whenever it wants. This often means that 1.x may have bugs still present in 1.z, but 1.z has features not originally included in 1.x. At a certain point you’re maintaining several versions of your product to test bug fixes, since 1.x users still deserve the bugs fixes but technically shouldn’t have the 1.z features. Better companies would be able to handle that, but nowadays bug fixes get extremely low priority since they’re spending a lot of dev time trying to attract and retain users with shiny new features, so that means active development on older versions for longer. Obviously the subscription revenue is also generally appealing.
My software for work operates this way. You buy a license, it just works. They add new features, and you pay to upgrade. They never add features that break it. It seems like a reasonable model.
To be clear, you still need your own HW and electricity, right?
Time to set up Jellyfin instead!
https://gardinerbryant.com/plexs-lifetime-pass-is-basically-dead-heres-how-to-switch-to-jellyfin/
As if there weren’t enough reasons to use jellyfin already.
Yep, definitely heading for bankruptcy.
Sigh. I still enjoy my Plex pass that I bought for < $100 but this is another sign to bail on them. I don’t particularly like them trying to further monetize my collection.
I do like the ease of sharing with friends and it does generally just work. But this is bad.
The rate of change in their eco system certainly does not justify the price they’re charging. Still, an IPO looms and business gotta business, so here we are. Ready for those stock options to tank and the boat to sink.
As always, donate to the FOSS alternatives instead.
In the case of Youtube Premium, donate to Ad Blockers instead.
I saw this email and it just read as a desperate cash grab for a company that doesnt plan to be around in 3 more years. Pathetic.
Wait, ya’ll are paying for Plex??
Paid 70€ maybe a decade ago
Best bang for buck so far
Sure, can I bundle it winRAR subscription?