With Plex adding “Live TV” and all the other shit for the past 6 years, their enshittification isn’t new. Most people I know still on Plex are only doing so because they paid for a lifetime pass. They’re full on sunk-cost-fallacy.

Remember how everyone lost their mind over Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year?

That was largely symptomatic of venture capital increasingly pulling out of tech. Partially because of the ongoing “are we in a recession or are we just acting like it?” mess. Partially because signs are good that we are going to have another Pandemic and are likely to handle it even more poorly. And partially because it has increasingly been clear that one company trying to pivot to become profitable means another startup takes their place.

And that means that a lot of the tech companies that have been operating at a loss for years/decades need to get their shit together.

Some of it is just frantic attempts to stem the bleeding resulting in bad will that will likely blow over (Reddit a few months ago… and twitter every week at this point). Some of it is a focused effort to start horrible so that the “compromise” is still favorable (MAYBE Unity?).

But expect more of this. Because it is largely the difference between existing and going bankrupt within the next year or two.

Tech has always been geared towards losing money to provide a valuable service but the understanding from investors who don’t loan for free is that at some point you turn on the profit engine. Some tech companies are able to generate revenue without necessarily making their product awful for users, but the more pull and pressure investors have, and the more driven by impatience, the enshittifier things become.

The Fed turning off the free money tap last year by starting to raise interest rates was an inevitable wake up call for investors that they needed to change their model to start profiting or at least lose less. Many, many companies, users and products are experiencing US’s investors-first-and-only capitalism’s inevitable end; it destroys the good it created. Companies without long-term investors or leverage to hold off investors willing to kill the golden goose either enshittify, or if they don’t have a way to enshittify, go under.

Interest rates. No free money.

Interest rates went up and the flood of money from investors went down.

Investors are probably demanding a return on their massive amounts of speculative investing in the tech industry.

There seems to be a pattern in services like this where they launch as a good idea that’s under priced and take off like a rocket, then growth levels off as everyone is either already using the service or never will regardless of what they do. Once you reach that point, however, you still need to show revenue growth because capitalism, so if you can’t get more users you either have to make the service more expensive for the users you have, or cheaper to run. The former we see happening all over the place, and the latter is actually a good thing in limited amounts as unnecessary parts are trimmed off, but will almost always also result in useful features being axed. Hence why everything seems to be getting more expensive and worse.

I’ve got gigs of music and rip all my Blu-rays. Jellyfin was a shock! Runs so much smoother, streaming faster. I had no idea streaming over my network can be effectively lag free. It’s also nice having a choice of players, some work better for Android Auto, some better on my Windows desktop etc.

Unfortunately Plex is a catchy name though. I’ve been with Jelly for a few years now and still call it Plex sometimes

Lack of an official tvOS app and Plex being easy to set up for my family keeps me from switching.

Putting Jellyfin behind a reverse proxy and making multiple users are both well supported features.

And wait until you hear about Jellyseer!

That… has nothing to do with this? Plex (ignoring the plex pass streaming stuff) mostly just provides a library lookup feature and a solid-ish app and web interface to access your self hosted media.

In this case, the problem is that people are hosting their media libraries in The Cloud. Not because of The Convenience but so that they can instance them and sell access to said media libraries to pay off the hosting fees and turn a profit.

The number of people who are innocently hosting their media library in The Cloud are a fraction of a percent. And most are getting gouged massively on the cost of storage and bandwidth.

“Never trust a machine you can’t throw out a window.” - Steve Wozniak

Pirates will move to self hosted if they can still turn a profit, which they can.

Self hosting is easy and convenient and doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge. Plex are literally harming their own business model by driving away non-technical users with a sledgehammer solution that no one likes.

Jellyfin is Emby minus the cost. Literally a fork of Emby that has far surpassed it at this point. Emby did that thing where they took an open source project and locked it behind a paywall for access, and I won’t support the Rent-your-software model.

I’ve been running Jellyfin since around it’s inception - highly recommend! Not quite as feature heavy as Plex yet, but an excellent community.

And that really bugs.
I keep all my media sorted in folders (old school I know). I went to try Plex once a few years back. It launched right into making an account and setting up remote access. Never was clear what if any access Plex mothership has to my media library- does that include filenames, file contents, everything? Sorry but do not want. I VPN back home, don’t need the cloud BS.

Yes, and no. In theory, you could absolutely “back up” any physical media you have to prevent wear and tear to the disc, which is a completely legitimate use case. And it’s not considered piracy because by buying that media, you purchased the legal rights to use it for personal viewing. However, if you ever gave a copy of that rip to another person (or gave that disc away to someone else without deleting your rips), you would be commiting piracy.

In fact, I believe that even viewing the media alongside another person is technically not allowed, although clearly that’s not enforced unless you’re doing some sort of public showing.

There is free content on Plex now. You could never pirate a single movie and still have content.

I have a mix. Ripping your own is in line with format shifting. Putting a cad into a cassette for use in your car that didn’t have a cd player is the old school equivalent. I believe it is a valid fair use case.

I use it for my own dvds/blu-rays, yeah. This is technically still considered piracy, but my personal view is that I’m fine paying for something once because the people who made it deserve to get paid, but I’m not fine paying for the same thing multiple times when the effort on their end to make the new version was basically zero. It would be one thing if there were physical costs like going from vhs to dvd, but that’s not the case here.

Yep. That’s my line too. The folks running paid servers are ruining it for the rest of us.

Exactly. Though usually once somebody does, that’s when the authorities get involved.