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Comment on Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April

I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.

Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.

Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.

That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.

Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.

Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.

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CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.

Are you under the impression that Plex uploads the movie files to their servers and then transcodes them there, or something?

And the hard work happens on your own hardware. All Plex’s servers are doing is acting as a signaling server, but no media or routed through Plex’s servers.

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- huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Plex actually does have streaming services. The ones we’ve never asked for. And live tv.
  
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  - CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    But the blog post from Plex was specifically talking about charging for remotely accessing your own files. So your point is irrelevant to the discussion.
    
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    huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    How is it irrelevant? Plex offers a bunch of services that cost them money that we don’t use, so they jacked up prices for streaming our own data.
    
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- kogasa@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It depends on if you use the “relay” feature. If your server is accessible from the outside it shouldn’t be using this though.
  
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  - jeanofthedead@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    First thing I disable.
    
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BradleyUffner@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
All those resources and costs are borne by the person hosting the video, NOT Plex.

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vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
they need none of that stuff. It’s your own pc that handles the heavy stuff. From their end, the only point is to allow you to stream videos from behind one or more NATs

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PoorlySketchedIdiot@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
That high performance, high bandwidth streaming machine is in my house, not Plex’s, though. I already pay for the maintenence, power and the bandwidth of that machine, not Plex.

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Markaos@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The thing that’s going to be locked behind the subscription is your ability to watch those files on your NAS through Plex when you’re not in the same network as the Plex server. That’s streaming.

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