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this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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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.
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.
It depends on if you use the "relay" feature. If your server is accessible from the outside it shouldn't be using this though.
First thing I disable.
Plex actually does have streaming services. The ones we've never asked for. And live tv.
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.
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.
It's irrelevant because even Plex themselves made no mention of their in-house streaming stuff. The discussion is about being charged to view your videos, hosted on your own self-hosted server, viewed on your own device.
I disagree. Sometimes you need to look at the situation as a whole in order to understand the motivation.
Ok, so you're implying people were using their videos for free instead of paying for the streaming services. Then Plex wanted more money so they've started to charge people for using their own stuff.
That's fine, and frankly I agree with that.
But your initial reply to me is still irrelevant to the discussion.
All those resources and costs are borne by the person hosting the video, NOT Plex.
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
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.
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.
If you only use Plex while at home, you will indeed be unaffected