Comment on That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 week agoYou have had one of the more reasonable outlooks of this. I get that most of this stuff is fairly advanced for the average person who may be wanting to host, but anymore with letsencrypt, if you can port forward and spin up a container to run a plex server… you’re pretty close to just doing everything yourself. I don’t know why Plex feels the need to charge for “remote streaming” when from what I can tell, the most they’re doing is pointing a client at my server. As I said in other comments, it seems like a fancy dynamic DNS service, which is like, pennies for a multi year subscription. (Because it really doesn’t do much)
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.
To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.
When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.