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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...
Were these 'technical issues' due to lawyers from media companies perhaps?
AC comments get piped to
Any pirate that uses plex is an idiot..just use a file server and smb or nfs shares over a network. Plex is trash.
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?
Man, I have a remote server using Plex.
I set it up with sonarr, radarr, headphones and usenet. I also have tautulli, cockpit, munin, owncloud, and resilio sync too.
I have a reverse proxy using Let's Encryt to manage everything in the front end.
Work's really well as a remote server using CentOS7 headless.
I have everything encrypted locally and on the network side. All the services are heavily firewalled and I only allow access to plex ports open to the world.
It's rock solid, can share my content privately and have access to it wherever I have a network connection.
Anyone trashing plex is seriously smoking crack and has no IT imagination on a good and functional remote (or local) deployment.