We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
The audacity of this company to increase prices when:
A) downloads are locked behind the paywall but havent worked in years (probably close to a decade at this point)
B) they focus all the development time on bringing bullshit to the platform (live tv, rentals, other streaming app searches, etc)
Requiring a subscription for remote access is actually fucking insane, they don’t have any bandwidth costs associated with that other than authentication so ???
This will drive people to Jellyfin, and watch how fast Plex drops into irrelevance when all the selfhosters move away. Plex is (now was) the #1 thing to that both myself and others in this community would recommend to someone looking to get into selfhosting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not anymore, wonder how much the revenue will drop?
They have provided a free relay service for years that makes it possible to access a server even if there are things in the way like CGNAT. That service had a low bandwidth limit but undoubtedly cost them money, so yes. But yes, they should have just moved that feature entirely to Plex pass (there is already a higher bandwidth limit for Plex pass users)
Ehhh i don’t think that justifies having people pay to stream, i doubt a lot of people even ever used that functionality and yeah they could have just pay walled it if it was that much of a problem.
I don’t think it justifies putting remote streams as a whole behind a paywall. But I suspect that the feature is very widely used since it makes remote streams work out of the box regardless of your setup. It’s also turned on by default.
Final thought: there’s also a fair chance (I’d rate it at almost 70%) that they presented this to us because they knew it would piss people off. Then, in a week or so, they will post a “we’re sorry, is this better?” with the changes they’re ACTUALLY going to make. A ploy to make us blindly agree to whatever they want because “at least it’s better than what they wanted originally” 🙄🙄
I could only get my downloads to work adding some conf line to my unbound DNS settings I saw on reddit.
Jellyfin is on my list.