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.

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Re: Translation

[grep -v '.*' *]

Troll? How the hell is the parent a troll? "Maybe you never leave your basement" -- that's not the kindest thing in the world I've ever heard, but from the previous inane statement not a bad assumption for him to make.

It's one thing to have everything local configured exactly how you like it on devices you directly control and own. Now (literally) take it outside of your basement (oops, guess I'm a troll now too!) and run it on random devices owned by other people you can't control with random connection speeds and random port restrictions with random codec support. Oh, did I mention that you've only got 3 minutes to get it working with just the hardware on hand -- just enough time for your audience to go make a sandwich or chips and dip before they come back?

NOW let's see how easy it is to use your home file server to play a file and still expect a modicum of security.