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Comment on Plex has paywalled my server!

oxjox@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What media management and consumption platform did you buy?
    
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  - catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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tkw8@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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