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.

Comments

This never made sense to me anyway

[qzzpjs]

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.

Re: Translation

[Wraithlyn]

Maybe you never leave your basement, but the rest of us do. What happens when you want to watch something outside your network? I don't use Plex much at home but it's great when I'm travelling to be able to effortlessly stream from my home computer.

Plex does realtime transcoding to adjust the quality based on available bandwidth. How's your brilliant fucking file server solution going to help with that?

Not to mention all the features you get like automatic metadata/poster fetching, sorting & categorization, keeping track of what you've watched and how much of something you've watched...

But yeah, useful features and ease-of-use are for idiots.