This headline should be edited to read: “Amazon decides to heavily promote Plex.”
They are coming for Plex too, I fear it might be more insidious in that they will already have so much user data by the time they decide to flip the switch on people using it.
I’m hoping jellyfin or emby get to the interface quality and platform support Plex has so there is a place to go when Plex gets sucked under the tide.
Tell us more. My assumption is that Plex would lose 80% of its installed base within three months of selling to an established player.
The one thing is could see happening is the streaming services, led by Amazon, working with Roku and the TV manufacturers to build in tracking of the video streams played over the device.
I remember when Plex was much more customizable, had plugins, and fully offline functionality.
When Apple TV relented and started supporting Plex, all of those features were striped away. UI customizability was the first to go, and you couldn’t even hold on to old versions because they were force updated and now required internet to work at all.
Then came the injection of ad supported streams that show up in searches as ‘movies and TV shows’ and my mother asks me why there are so many commercials because outside nonsense was reenabled on her app after an update. Adding channels to users screens and frequently re-enabling things despite users explicitly trying to disable them while requiring everything to be online all the time is not a good sign.
I love Plex. I have been a lifetime member for over ten years and building my homelab has been a fantastic learning experience and now career that would not have happened if I didn’t get into Plex. It’s a wonderful product, I do fear that lifetime members like myself are not driving the economic interests of the company though. They’ve already got my money, and to be fair I got much more than I paid for.
The reason for cord cutting was because at $15 it was better than cable. This is cable that requires me to pay for internet. We’re at the point where the only option is to pirate.
Way too many studios think that money and bigger budgets are a substitute for quality writing and directing. They also know that a lot of people won’t accept higher monthly rates, so ads are the only way to offset the massively bloated production costs.
