alt Hacker NewsAccording to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform:
> Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.
So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market.
Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab...
I have seen people talking about this "hosting a small streaming service for friends" thing, and I really have trouble understanding that. It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it, even with a VPN, and I don't know what kind of friends they have. That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.