cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639
I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That's it folks. I've been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.
They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.
I'll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I've been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it's time to make it production ready.
Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.
And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:
- YES I know I'm unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
- My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don't understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn't have to, that's why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
- Plex is still removing functionality. I don't care that "People should pay their fair share". If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that's completely okay. They are removing functionality.
- "But they have cloud costs". Remote streaming is negligible to them. It's a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That's it.
- "Good luck finding another remote streaming" - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that's a separate conversation). All "remote streaming" is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported "free" content that they're probably losing money on.
In short, I don't care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They're removing functionality that has been free for years. I'm not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.
It's not completely gone, it's just that now they offer you a way to do it, here's some doc about it:
Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/
Source: https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/policies-compliances/delivering-videos-with-cloudflare/
In short, streaming videos hosted on your server is still against TOS, but they now offer a thing called Stream where you can host videos to be streamed without violating it.
That's for the CDN. It's about serving static, cached content faster. I actually tried to pay and use their Stream service, but it's only to be used for serving video in a web page. While they've not directly clarified on the topic (even after being asked directly in the forums several times), don't turn on caching and it appears to serve the language they've used in the updated TOS. I'm not a lawyer here, but parse that all as you will. Don't take up storage on their CDN and they seem to be happy. I actually did buy some domain names through them to make sure I'm not just using their services without giving anything back. But, that's a matter of conscience.