Important 2025 Plex Updates
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Personal Media and Beyond You’re going to be hearing a lot from us this year—we’ve got a ton of exciting...

We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.

  • Evotech@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    9 hours ago

    They make a product. It’s not just the cost of infrastructure.

    They have developers and other employees

    • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      8 hours ago

      And this isn’t a new feature they’re adding. Remote streaming was already implemented and generally available to users.

      I don’t discount there being a cost in maintaining code over time, but it’s not as though they have to spend any significant employee time on improving it. They already support UPnP and NAT-PMP to have the clients connect directly to the self-hosted servers.

      It would be nice if they added NAT hole punching on top of that, but it’s evidently good enough to work as-is in its current form. If they’re not even running relays to support more tricky networks (which the linked support article has no mention of), keeping this feature free costs them literally nothing extra.