I don’t use plex and don’t plan to but if you’re looking for a deal on the lifetime plan here’s your chance. Act fast though, it’s only on for a couple of days.
I think they’re in panic mode now. They blanket banned every single user of Hetzner who host their PMS with them. Because Hetzner are relatively cheap that’s were the dumb resellers are often based. So their approach was “let’s ban the whole Hetzner IP range.” OVH and Kimsufi etc…are sure to follow unless someone wakes up and realises that there’s a better way to deal with resellers.
Next up they only yesterday banned a guy (there’s probably more than him) who hosted Plex at home and shared with only 6 close friends and family so decided he must have been a reseller also. Despite 4 of those 6 living in the same house as him. Apparently he got his service back after a session of interrogation and water boarding.
Their trample over everybody approach to
banning Hetzner users is seemingly justified because Plex have now stated that Plex was never designed to be run anything but locally. The irony being that many (including me) who host(ed) in the cloud got the idea from Plex and it’s long since aborted Plex Cloud.
When launched Plex very own shiny blog post was something along the lines of…
“Why host locally, why maintain hardware, Plex can do it all in the cloud so take away the stress, shut down your local server and host in the cloud.”!
Back on topic though… for anyone who is already aware of Plex contempt for its users it’s a pretty good deal on the lifetime and despite my other comments I don’t really regret buying mine 10 years ago, based on what Plex once was rather than what it has become.
I blame it all on Block Buster. Till then you went to K-Mart, bought the $3 DVD (or VHS tape) out of the big bin and a tin of JiffyPop for the Friday night entertainment.
Once you based your night on a company’s ability to serve what you want you’re no longer in control.
Ah that takes me back. Region 1 for you stateside guys, Region 2 in most of Europe.
Purchasing my chipped player that could play both and importing DVD’s from the U.S. or Canada because back then we were so far behind with cinema releases that a movie stateside would do the cinema rounds and hit DVD often months before it hit the cinemas here.
I must say as a 10+ year lifetime user of Plex, I understand why they did this. It may not be pretty but perhaps necessary.
If you remember how Plex was marketed and used (before Plex cloud) it was always meant to be a home server for personal media. The Plex Cloud experiment brought a lot of heat towards them for allowing “piracy in the cloud” and if they didn’t end that, maybe Plex wouldn’t exist today.
I think they face a similar issue now with resellers hosting massive servers in the cloud and charging people money for access. I don’t think Plex was ever meant to be used that way (before the Plex cloud fiasco) so this move I feel is them going back to the roots of what made Plex great. A home media server for you and family.
While Plex is far from perfect, they are still an amazing company with some great people still on board. Plex HTPC and PlexAmp developers in particular really care about the work they do and interact with users regularly. However the employees are still people and the amount of negativity users throw at them, it’s understandable they get frustrated.
Plex X Infuse is a great combo. If you are like me and love editing metadata and adding custom artwork to collections, love listening to music (PlexAmp) then Plex is a worthy investment for sure IMO.