This company sounds like it’s in its death throes.

  • mintiefresh@piefed.ca
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    10 hours ago

    Wow, I got the Plex pass 15 years ago for like $70.

    It is absurd to see it is over $700 dollars now.

    I imagine it’s to discourage the purchase of plex life time. But there’s something about this that is feels so bad man.

    I have spun up Jellyfin to run alongside Plex and I’m ready to switch over full time in case Plex ever goes after the old life time users. You just never know with these days.

    And tbh, Jellyfin is pretty awesome. It seems to run lighter and faster than Plex. Nobody should be buying a $700 pass to watch your own content.

    • NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      I need to do the same thing, but how did you do it alongside Plex? Meaning, can it just point to the same library and neither Plex nor Jellyfin gets confused (because of one generating files or paths that messes up the other installation)?

    • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      I also have lifetime plexpass but plex has pissed me off too much with recent changes that make the experience worse. the enshittification is inevitable, so i just cut my losses and am riding the upswing of Jellyfin. It’s objectively not as good yet but i have found some temporary workarounds for the biggest omissions.

    • Carrot@lemmy.today
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      6 hours ago

      I paid $100 a handful of years ago, and it felt worth it at the time. Jellyfin has improved tremendously in that time, adding intro/outro skip, a tizen app, better collections support, and is super snappy comparatively. I thought my streaming server was to blame for the long buffer times at the start of media, but clearly not because Jellyfin starts almost as soon as the player loads in. Plex has gotten worse, more invasive, more expensive, and more sluggish since then. I’ll never look back to Plex. What value they offer on top of Jellyfin’s functionality (which is shrinking year by year) isn’t worth the $2 per phone per month for my new users. I made the switch for ~20 family/friends, and other than the name, people only had praises for Jellyfin.

  • auzy1@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    What’s the point? Better off paying for Netflix at that rate for a few years

    I bought my lifetime pass years ago. But, there is no way that plex is worth more than an entire computer

    • bigbangdangler@reddthat.com
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      2 hours ago

      It’s so weird though. Do they not know it exists? Do they expect their customers not to know it exists?

      When your primary competition is free (and arguably better), the last thing one should think to do is raise prices.

      I can only assume that some C-suites are looking at numbers and don’t know what else to do but make the product more expensive.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    11 hours ago

    So instead of retiring it, we’re keeping it available at a price that reflects the real, ongoing value of the software we’re committed to building and maintaining for years to come.

    I left Plex because of exactly this. What exactly have they delivered lately to actual users that isn’t BS cloud streaming stuff?

    • HeartyOfGlass@piefed.social
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      8 hours ago

      Bought a Plex Pass when it was $100. Pretty decent at the time, much easier to get the family hooked up to that vs Jellyfin.

      And every change they’ve made - especially adding their own completely trash streaming library - has taken value away from that pass.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        7 hours ago

        Agree, I still have my $100 pass too, but it just got to the point where I couldn’t justify it anymore. I got almost ten years out of that pass, I consider that good. 10 dollars a year to support their development. Then their development stopped being for server owners like me, and I knew it was sadly time to move on.

    • reddig33@lemmy.worldOP
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      10 hours ago

      Well, they redesigned their mobile app so that it only works half as well as it used to. That’s quite the accomplishment!

  • MurrayL@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    They almost certainly don’t expect people to buy it at this price. They’re putting it out to pasture.

    Give it a year or two and they’ll do an announcement that no one is purchasing lifetime licenses so they’re sunsetting the scheme altogether.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    The problem is the “lifetime” option, they needed to just stop offering it.

    The optics of making it prohibitively expensive instead is just terrible.

    It used to “pay for itself” after 3.5 years, now it takes over a decade. I don’t think they understand most people were buying it before (as in a decade ago) as a form of donation to a software that didn’t have a good alternative.

    Now that Plex is trying to become a media streamer themselves for a revenue stream, and alternatives like jellyfin exist for what made Plex popular…

    They should have just sunset the “lifetime” deal

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      It used to “pay for itself” after 3.5 years, now it takes over a decade.

      The cynic in me says that this also means subscription pass costs will be going up in the future too. So it may again “pay for itself” after 3.5 years with a $750 price tag for lifetime

    • hypnicjerk@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      if they thought the $750 price point would make them more money than $250, they would just raise the price. instead they’re exploiting fomo and essentially admitting that the market has dried up but they want to continue to dangle bait for whales.

  • the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    LOL, fuck off. I dropped plex for jellyfin as soon as they hid encoding behind a paywall and every time I see anything related I’m so glad I left them behind.

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Hmm, I’m of two minds about this

    On the one hand it’s simply a ridiculous increase and pretty indefensible as a jump. Especially given that it doesn’t really offer much you can’t do for free with something like jellyfin

    On the other hand at least they still offer a lifetime sub, crazy expensive yes, but the option is still technically there for someone who wants to use the software without subscription. Plenty of companies have gone down the sub only road, and I think we should give at least a bit of credit for them not doing the same, even though they’d clearly like to

    I know audiophiles are a bit of an outlier in general, but Roon lifetime is even more IIRC!

  • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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    10 hours ago

    Fuck you plex. Ditched you a long time ago and it was obviously the right choice. If anyone gets money it’s Emby. Yes I know about Jellyfin but it just sucks with HDR. Totally.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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        7 hours ago

        To mpv-shim? Yeah that works but is the stupidest shit ever, sadly. Linux tho. Dunno if works fine on win without the helper.

        • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          i honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. server is a container on unraid and streams to various playback devices. no helpers or anything else required.

  • kmirl@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    We have Rokus on our TVs and ditched Plex as soon as a Jellyfin app became available

  • TheHighRoad@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    I don’t get what the point of this is. I have never paid a cent for Plex. If I ever want to access my library remotely, I’ll use something else.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      11 hours ago

      Ya, I transitioned to an always on VPN a few years ago (VPN to my house, not one of those honeypot ones) so I don’t even really need it anymore. But I paid something ridiculously low years and years ago. Whatever the price was before it moved to $75.

      If I were starting from scratch today, I’d just build out Jellyfin instead.