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Plex To Shut Down Its Cloud Service (variety.com)
Plex has informed users that it will be shutting down cloud-based media server Plex Cloud at the end of November. First launched in 2016, Plex Cloud offered users a way to easily access extra storage. Initially, users had to subscribe to Amazon Drive, which cost $59.99 a year for unlimited storage at the time and get a Plex Pass in order to use Plex Cloud. Later on, Plex added support for Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage. From a report, which looks at the rationale behind the move: "We've made the difficult decision to shut down the Plex Cloud service on November 30th, 2018," the company said in an email. "We've been actively working on ways to address various issues while keeping costs under control. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven't found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost." Plex has traditionally relied on users operating their own media server to stream videos, music and more to mobile and TV-connected devices. Plex users often run their server hardware on dedicated computers or network-attached storage drives, but the reliance on such hardware has limited the appeal of the software to more casual users. [...] Behind the scenes, Plex was augmenting these storage solutions with its own cloud servers, capable of transcoding media on the fly to stream to a wide variety of devices. However, the company ran into some technical issues, which prompted it to first disable support for Amazon's cloud storage and then in February halt the creation of new cloud servers.
Not to sh%t on plex, but the bulk of people who use plex have at least some if not most of their library built up of pirated movies and tv content... These folks are not exactly keen to put that in the cloud...
They couldn't figure out a middleman business case to convince people to pay money to use their own resources.
Were these 'technical issues' due to lawyers from media companies perhaps?
AC comments get piped to
Not your server, not your data. How many more incidents before people get it.
and watch the cloud go *poof*
I had to search to find out wtf this "plex" thing is. Something something streaming media something. Fine, whatever.
More interestingly, everyone wants in on "cloud" and then just a few years on these "cloudified" services vanish up in thin air.
IOW, no staying power. How about just owning your own storage and not having to find a new supplier for each and every "cloud" service you signed up for, say, every two years or so?
They wanted us to waste bandwidth and cloud storage to copy the files we already have somewhere locally to the cloud just so we could download them back again to play. Once again, wasting bandwidth caps that we might have.
Setting up the Plex server software on an old computer, laptop, etc takes 10 minutes and you don't waste any bandwidth or cloud storage. Using their cloud service on the other hand is a lot harder to setup and manage because you had to setup the cloud account, give them access to it, send up your files, etc.
it's always there for me, waiting with open arms. i've never experienced an OS like it!
So if you're feeling sad, if the cloud is making you mad.... try Plan9OS.
This reads like a total comedy. Proprietary file-serving service, another proprietary file-serving service, etc. It's 2018. Where's the NFS or SFTP or (*sigh*) even SMB/CIFS? No wonder I never bothered with Plex!
They found out cloud providers charge for bandwidth both up and down stream
and opted not to join up for the paid plan. As far as I could tell, the best feature was the channels which are free. Some of the networks, CBS for example, put up full run episodes without any commercials. So you could watch, say, Hawaii 5-0 a few days after it aired commercial free in 1080.
But honestly I don't use Plex much these days. Lots of other ways to get content with a lot less fuss.
I have a lifetime subscription. I did not ever put anything in the cloud. I heard about it by word of mouth from people who put their entire media collections, mostly pirated, in to the cloud storage so they could share their library with friends and also for the stated ales reason of streaming their own stuff from cloud storage to anything anywhere. I'm guessing the first part is where they ran in to problems.
When I tell them I don't put things on the cloud and have my own media storage devices for TV shows and things.
Their model usually works, but they overextended at this cloud thing.
First they got the Amazon to shut down the unlimited offering. Basically what Plex enables with "cloud" is that serving your own content, on 3rd party cloud providers, including Amazon, Dropbox etc. However when people uploaded their entire libraries to Amazon "unlimited" layer, all of a sudden Amazon decided to no longer provide such a storage.
Then Plex seem to have struggled just to keep the indexing / serving infrastructure for this service. These costs real CPU cycles, and they add up. Even if you pay, it would not be enough. So they are shutting down the "frontend".
At least you can still serve your own content on your own hardware (or vps). However I don't think you can serve thru Dropbox / etc directly anymore.