To be blunt, that’s a huge chunk of their userbase. And they run the risk of being legally pounded to dust once that image takes hold.
So how do they avoid that? Add a bunch of other stuff, for plausible deniability. And it seems to have worked, as the anti-piracy gods haven’t singled them out like they have past software projects.
To be clear, I’m not excusing Plex. But I can sympathize.
There is that but it’s primarily that they’ve taken over 40 million dollars of venture capital. They are almost certainly under immense pressure to turn profitable asap and converting lifetime pass users into revenue streams somehow, converting new users into SaaS, etc are going to be things they pursue more aggressively.
Don’t take the devils money if you don’t want the devils stipulations
They’ve taken other measures as well. Nobody knows the details besides them, but they blocked an entire cloud provider called Hetzner because too many people were using it for pirate Plex servers. They absolutely have to maintain the image of being legitimate like you said.
Dynamic DNS does cost money. But not $8 a month. Development also costs money which falls under the $8 a month, but really not my problem, which is why I use Jellyfin. I used to run Plex off of my Nvidia shield, which was a cool gateway drug to self hosting and I’m grateful to them for that, but I like handling the technical stuff myself.
That serves the purpose too. It’s harder to pin Plex as an “illegal distribution service” when you have to pay for access. Either the streamer or “distributor” can’t be very anonymous, which makes large scale sharing impractical.
On the other hand, the more money they squeeze out, the more they risk appearing as if they “make money from piracy,” which is exactly how you get the MPAA’s attention.
I admit I’m very out of the loop, but my understanding is that remote access via their servers is the only supported remote viewing solution? Anything else is a “hack” so to speak.
Playing devil’s advocate, I understand one point of pressure: Plex doesn’t want to be perceived as a “piracy app.”
See: Kodi. https://kodi.expert/kodi-news/mpaa-warns-increasing-kodi-abuse-poses-greater-video-piracy-risk/
To be blunt, that’s a huge chunk of their userbase. And they run the risk of being legally pounded to dust once that image takes hold.
So how do they avoid that? Add a bunch of other stuff, for plausible deniability. And it seems to have worked, as the anti-piracy gods haven’t singled them out like they have past software projects.
To be clear, I’m not excusing Plex. But I can sympathize.
There is that but it’s primarily that they’ve taken over 40 million dollars of venture capital. They are almost certainly under immense pressure to turn profitable asap and converting lifetime pass users into revenue streams somehow, converting new users into SaaS, etc are going to be things they pursue more aggressively.
Don’t take the devils money if you don’t want the devils stipulations
They’ve taken other measures as well. Nobody knows the details besides them, but they blocked an entire cloud provider called Hetzner because too many people were using it for pirate Plex servers. They absolutely have to maintain the image of being legitimate like you said.
I wish more people understood this perspective
It’s really nice of them to fight the good fight while I use Jellyfin instead.
You may (half) joke, but MPAA attention on Jellyfin would suck.
I’d like to call this “the Ubuntu buffer”.
Which doesn’t have half the features and crap security compared to Plex/Emby.
Sure, apart from charging for remote access.
Dynamic DNS does cost money. But not $8 a month. Development also costs money which falls under the $8 a month, but really not my problem, which is why I use Jellyfin. I used to run Plex off of my Nvidia shield, which was a cool gateway drug to self hosting and I’m grateful to them for that, but I like handling the technical stuff myself.
That serves the purpose too. It’s harder to pin Plex as an “illegal distribution service” when you have to pay for access. Either the streamer or “distributor” can’t be very anonymous, which makes large scale sharing impractical.
On the other hand, the more money they squeeze out, the more they risk appearing as if they “make money from piracy,” which is exactly how you get the MPAA’s attention.
Remote access via their servers.
I admit I’m very out of the loop, but my understanding is that remote access via their servers is the only supported remote viewing solution? Anything else is a “hack” so to speak.
Everything else is “a hack” in the sense that it is literally just the way to get Jellyfin working outside your network too.
It’s really not. They handle authentication but then everything is sent to your server.