Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.

Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.

I dunno about that. Plex has lots of market share and plenty of “well I bought the pass when it was $60/$90” people aren’t gonna be personally affected by them locking more and more functionality behind the pass. So they’ll keep using it and recommending it and talking about it, and the centralized account management stuff (which Jellyfin won’t copy, because not having that is the point of selfhosting) will always be more convenient than setting up VPNs or other tools like external auth for Jellyfin sharing over the internet.

Discourse about this everywhere always boils down to the same comment: “I bought the plex pass and honestly I’d do it again for $300 just to not deal with handling my own authentication system, plex remote play Just Works”. Or something like “I refuse to use a $20 HDMI android TV box instead of my ad-ridden smart TV or PlayStation 5, and those don’t have apps for JF”. These guys are literally in this thread, on Lemmy, the Reddit for people so FOSS-friendly they use Lemmy instead of Reddit.

Yes, that is correct. It’s because the people that read the email only, or read the email and click one (1) link, are likely to be less familiar with Plex as a platform than the server owner. Plex the company would very much like people to pay them $7 a month forever for literally nothing.

but it’s not, because “i got it so cheap for $60 ten years ago / $90 five years ago / $120 yesterday” and “securely opening a port and enabling OAuth for jellyfin takes more than one click”.

The “lifetime” Plex Pass was a genius marketing move, because people are permanently inertia-locked into the cost they sunk. For nearly a decade now the refrain is “I just have a Plex pass. I bought it for $30 less than its current cost and it works great for me, sucks that it’s now $90/$120/$240 but IMO it’s worth it :)”. Don’t forget that making you pay $60 or $90 or $120 or $240 to use your own GPU for hardware encoding was always a scumware tactic, even if they put up a $15/mo subscription next to that one-time cost so that the one-time cost looks like “a good deal”.

It’s scummy advertising, yes. Designed to prey on a Plex server operator’s likely-less-tech-literate users.

Yes, they’re being advertised to. In theory this is because they might be clients for non-Pass servers in addition to yours. In practice, Plex could easily verify Plex client accounts that don’t run a server or have access to non-Pass servers and skip sending this marketing email to those accounts. What they’re doing is trying to convince your users they need to pay a sub fee (even though they don’t), because it’s free money in Plex’s pocket if the users do click the thing and say “welp, still cheaper than netflix”

Any users of your plex-pass verified server do not need to pay anything to keep streaming it. You had to pay a lot more for the lifetime or subscription to enable it, but by doing so any users you share with don’t need to pay a dime. You reading this press release and seeing your users get emails and assuming that your users now need to pay for something isn’t you being stupid, it’s the intended result of their deliberately confusing messaging. One user shrugging and saying “guess it’s $7/mo now” is free money for the company.

Gw2 jumpscare

The equivalents for Android, precompiled ReVanced APKs, are commonly used to spread malware. Following the instructions to patch the app yourself isn’t hard. Google taking down precompiled modded versions of YouTube but leaving patches and the the tools anybody can use to apply them is a neutral thing at worst.

Also I don’t see anyone in this thread glad that Google did this, aside from the first half of the joke / fakeout / pun post about IPA beer.