Slashdot Mirror
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*
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.
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.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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.
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.
Plex Media Server as a platform for sorting and delivering video content is really goddamned good. Almost magic. There are a handful of TV shows where there are arguments about how the episodes should be ordered (Doctor Who is the biggest example) but for the most part, if you sort your content between TV and Movies, it'll figure everything out.
Plex is pretty bad at handling music, but that's definitely an afterthought compared to video content. It can also work with a OTA TV tuner and has limited support for web scraping.
The Cloud Server deal is for I-don't-know-who. Maybe people with laptops or tablets and a multi-terabyte Google Drive or OneDrive account?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.