Technology

With Plex adding "Live TV" and all the other shit for the past 6 years, their enshittification isn't new. Most people I know still on Plex are only doing so because they paid for a lifetime pass. They're full on sunk-cost-fallacy.

Tech has always been geared towards losing money to provide a valuable service but the understanding from investors who don't loan for free is that at some point you turn on the profit engine. Some tech companies are able to generate revenue without necessarily making their product awful for users, but the more pull and pressure investors have, and the more driven by impatience, the enshittifier things become.

The Fed turning off the free money tap last year by starting to raise interest rates was an inevitable wake up call for investors that they needed to change their model to start profiting or at least lose less. Many, many companies, users and products are experiencing US's investors-first-and-only capitalism's inevitable end; it destroys the good it created. Companies without long-term investors or leverage to hold off investors willing to kill the golden goose either enshittify, or if they don't have a way to enshittify, go under.

Interest rates. No free money.

Interest rates went up and the flood of money from investors went down.

Investors are probably demanding a return on their massive amounts of speculative investing in the tech industry.

There seems to be a pattern in services like this where they launch as a good idea that's under priced and take off like a rocket, then growth levels off as everyone is either already using the service or never will regardless of what they do. Once you reach that point, however, you still need to show revenue growth because capitalism, so if you can't get more users you either have to make the service more expensive for the users you have, or cheaper to run. The former we see happening all over the place, and the latter is actually a good thing in limited amounts as unnecessary parts are trimmed off, but will almost always also result in useful features being axed. Hence why everything seems to be getting more expensive and worse.

Lack of an official tvOS app and Plex being easy to set up for my family keeps me from switching.

Putting Jellyfin behind a reverse proxy and making multiple users are both well supported features.

And wait until you hear about Jellyseer!

“Never trust a machine you can’t throw out a window.” - Steve Wozniak

Pirates will move to self hosted if they can still turn a profit, which they can.

Self hosting is easy and convenient and doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge. Plex are literally harming their own business model by driving away non-technical users with a sledgehammer solution that no one likes.

Jellyfin is Emby minus the cost. Literally a fork of Emby that has far surpassed it at this point. Emby did that thing where they took an open source project and locked it behind a paywall for access, and I won't support the Rent-your-software model.

I've been running Jellyfin since around it's inception - highly recommend! Not quite as feature heavy as Plex yet, but an excellent community.

Yes, and no. In theory, you could absolutely "back up" any physical media you have to prevent wear and tear to the disc, which is a completely legitimate use case. And it's not considered piracy because by buying that media, you purchased the legal rights to use it for personal viewing. However, if you ever gave a copy of that rip to another person (or gave that disc away to someone else without deleting your rips), you would be commiting piracy.

In fact, I believe that even viewing the media alongside another person is technically not allowed, although clearly that's not enforced unless you're doing some sort of public showing.

I use it for my own dvds/blu-rays, yeah. This is technically still considered piracy, but my personal view is that I'm fine paying for something once because the people who made it deserve to get paid, but I'm not fine paying for the same thing multiple times when the effort on their end to make the new version was basically zero. It would be one thing if there were physical costs like going from vhs to dvd, but that's not the case here.

There is free content on Plex now. You could never pirate a single movie and still have content.

Yep. That's my line too. The folks running paid servers are ruining it for the rest of us.

Exactly. Though usually once somebody does, that's when the authorities get involved.