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Comment on Plex has paywalled my server!

tkw8@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

I’ve never been a Plex user. Always been with Jellyfin. I’ve heard that plexamp is a killer app but finamp has always been sufficient for my admittely pretty basic needs. But I have a question for you (meant in good faith). You say,

I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.

If Plex needs a sustainable business model, asking for donations isn’t enough. So what is the move for them? What do they do to both fulfill their need for a sustainable business and also not upset their userbase?

I’m genuinely curious how, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, they should have played this or at a minimum, made better than they did.

Very glad you’re with jellyfin btw. You can check out some cool plugins at awesome-jellyfin.

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ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Donations isn’t going to cover the hunger of a 40 million dollar VC round. Those investors want more than a return, they want plex profitable ASAP

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- ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Investors are like parasitic leeches to any business model. As soon as you add them, the business has to grow in order to satisfy the leeches who provide no benefit to the model other than to be attached to it. If you ignore the leech, they’ll drain all your lifeforce, so you’re only option is to satisfy them and feed them. Unfortunately, they are also ravenous creatures who are never satisfied. If you feed them a little, they’ll want more next time in an endless cycle.
  
  Once you are infected by investors … eventually they will destroy whatever you created.
  
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  - tkw8@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    You have this semi-backwards. The VC isn’t really a leech because Plex pitches the venture fund with a well developed enshittification plan already in place. Assuming everyone is acting in good faith (i.e. the VC doesn’t just want to just shut it down and sell Plex for parts), Plex’s (enshittification) plan is the reason it makes sense for the venture fund to invest in the first place. Plex promises their plan is why the VC will make an outsized return on their investment and it is what the VC validates as part of their pre-investment due diligence. But that plan is created (and sometimes even put into operation) before any VC investment occurs.
    
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    non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Yes, you got this bang-on. Plex made the decision long ago.
    
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- Jason2357@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Exactly. Plex could have been “profitable” in the sense that revenue covered infrastructure and paid a handful of full time employees, but that’s not what VC money needs.
  
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oxjox@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

So what is the move for them?

Plex has a two-pronged VOD service. They have ad-supported “live television” and they have content to rent.

I don’t know if that’s enough to sustain them but I don’t really care. I’ve been a PlexPass owner for over ten years. I have only asked that they resolve bugs and made requests for things like proper organization of classical music (which they’ve explicitly stated they will not consider).

You do bring to light something I hadn’t considered; that they see Plex as a business model. From my perspective, I want to buy a fully developed product with the expectation of bug fixes and security patches etc over time. I genuinely can not think of a single thing the developers have added to the service that I’ve used in the past ten years.

So, what kind of business model charges money to do things that don’t have an apparent impact on the user experience?

Plex has been one of my most used applications in the past decade. However, it has its limitations and they are actively imposing more limitations on the experience in favor of “a sustainable business model”.

The issue is that their sustainable business model is interrupting the users’ sustained use of a platform they’ve already paid for. I’ve had to go through all of my devices and disable all auto-updates to ensure I do not get the “New Plex Experience”.

What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.

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- tkw8@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.
  
  Such a good question. Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons: one cynical, one a little more practical.
  
  Cynical first lol: Maxmize profits. Why charge once when you can charge monthly. I’ll move off this bc it’s a topic that’s been beaten to death, esp. here on Lemmy.
  
  The more practical reason is probably because most software interacts pretty directly with the internet in some way. When we were just installing MSOffice98 with clippy, software didn’t need constant security updates, patches, etc. Remember when there was an update for MSOffice and you’d install Service Pack 1? That was one of the first patches I downloaded from the internet and it was a big deal back then. Now updates come out at least monthly, many times more often than that. I guess that means that you have multple product cycles occuring concurrently, which creates a financial model with a lot more unknowns… which in turn makes it harder to forecast what a product should cost, considering it would be the only revenue generated, per license for the life of the product.
  
  I think selling a product is still a very viable business model, but you have to be a lot more accurate about revenue forcasting and product pricing. I guess it means you have a lot less room for error (from a business perspective).
  
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  - oxjox@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    This is not Microsoft. I haven’t updated my plex software in over six months and it runs fine. Still, yes, I would expect updates to any software I purchase as new patches are needed for OS updates, etc. That shouldn’t be more than two updates a year for a given OS - if at all.
    
    Selling a product, generating revenue, using revenue to improve products or create new products is how we used to run businesses.
    
    If they’re unable to maintain software updates with the revenue they get, then they should discontinue support of less popular products.
    
    As I’ve stated on the plex forum, plex is no longer a media management and consumption platform. It’s a video on demand service. That’s their prerogative and that’s fine. The issue is that they’re discontinuing a product that people have purchased and use on a regular basis. I paid money for a product and that product can no longer be used if I change the device I use that product on. They should have left the existing product alone and released something wholly new.
    
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- catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.
  
  Because they’re not selling a product, they’re selling an ongoing service. They run the relay servers, and those cost money every month.
  
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  - oxjox@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I bought a media management and consumption platform running on my own server using my own clients. For what reason do I need a relay service to watch content in my house on my server?
    
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    FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    What media management and consumption platform did you buy?
    
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    catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    No idea, you’re the one that bought it. I did the same thing for a few years and never bought a plex pass.
    
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non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
There are a few ways Plex could have played this:

By attrition. Stop the sale of plex pass, but leave those users and their access alone. New sign-ups get new rules about features/$.

By using some of their revenue to paywall Premium features, keep a cut-down but functional version for non-paying plebs. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing, even for streaming outside your network (which you could cap at X number of hours per month)

Start making Plex features a-la-carte, meaning, $2/mth for HDR, 4$ for streaming, etc. Or bundles.

The point is there are lots of companies who do this right and don’t have such a blatant disregard for the user. In the long run, this will not help Plex, it will help other streaming service helpers who are actually willing to respect users.

I know you’re not defending Plex and I acknowledge that. However, I see a lot of “How are they supposed to make their money?” arguments here, hence my description above of just a few models Plex could have chosen instead of f**king the customer.
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- tkw8@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yeah. “How are they supposed to make their money” is a question that I’m grappling with right now. OSS is hard enough with a straightforward MIT license but figuring out how to monetize in this space (that doesn’t always reward nuance), adds a lot of complexity. I’m starting fresh, so I’m not changing anything on anyone… but getting a monetization strategy that is 100% perfect out of the gate is not likely so seeing this vs. a response like Pangolin’s is helpful.
  
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  - non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That’s a good point, and it’s one that isn’t solved yet in the foss space.
    
    There are some success stories like Blender, and other projects like Thunderbird and KDE who have recently made their model work through voluntary donations, albeit by hiring competent management of such donations. And there are lots and lots of projects somewhere in between.
    
    The interesting questions to me aren’t so much about Plex, but the infrastructure behind all the tools we use: NTP on Linux, build tools, ffmpeg libraries, etc. Lots of other companies make products that make money, yet kick back nothing to these.
    
    Would a royalty system work? I dont know.
    
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haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
From my view, a sustainable business model is very different from the way things are done lately. I built and managed multiple successful businesses and making them sustainable is doable without fucking over your customers.

They could absolutely have done a lot better things to gain more income. The important base question here is “how much do they need?” Because software does not have huge ongoing costs but massive initial costs and lower sustaining costs. Of course, large changes or complete makeorvers will be intense but they are not needed in every company.

Once that is clear, they could have started with better public relations, engaging people about the need for a specific sum or recurring revenue. They could have gamified it by selling badges, additional functions, tiers, restrictions on new installations, etc. But they didnt. They chose to paywall existing functions. one. After. The. Other.

Dick move.

So yeah, building a business is no joke but thats not for me.

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- FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Saying software does not have huge ongoing costs shows you’ve never worked on any huge software system. My works ongoing costs for hosting/scaling/storing data are millions of dollars a year.
  
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  - haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    You’re both right and wrong.
    
    Its like saying “saying a company is easy to run shows you have never run an huge company.”
    
    Both are false dychotomies. The amount of hosting costs, manpower, etc does not come from the project but how it is set up.
    
    If you have to run servers for a software at all determines the cost for hosting for example. Same for every other aspect.
    
    Linux is a huge software project I’m working on. Yet the cost of it is a joke compared to its size. It has way more users than plex.
    
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    FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    You were the one that made the claim that “software doesn’t have huge ongoing costs”, which is what I said is wrong. Lots of software does, as you now agree.
    
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- tkw8@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Really glad you replied. Thank you. Your points are really good ones. I want to build something (software) for myself and the community but also struggle with where to draw the line when it comes to making my product generate revenue too. It’s a thing we don’t really talk about when it comes to OSS. Maybe we should create a new category called SOSS, (sustainable oss) lol.
  
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  - wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Some FOSS projects are supported by having a for-profit company offer turnkey packaging and support for those projects. Look at TrueNAS. They sell nice NAS hardware preconfigured with their software and the profits support the development.
    
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    haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Good point. I wanna point out that plex is not foss. Its closed source software which makes those moves even more idiotic because they could have paywalled new servers and accounts instead or weaned people off from their servers if they use local only, etc.
    
    But yes, one only needs to look at foss projects like lemmy, pixelfed, kde, gnome to see how it is done. This absolutely means you have to have more people than just yourself or you will definitely burn out.
    
    Tldr: some use gov funding, kickstarter, additional features, turnkey hosting, explain and ask for donations, etc.
    
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