What’s going on?
If you’ve been using Plex, especially if you have been using it for a decent amount of time, you are likely aware that things within the company seem to be in a “not good” state. They have gone through a variety of shifts in focus and such over the course of time, seemingly unable to ultimately figure out what they were genuinely trying to shape the product and company into. It’s also quite likely that a lot of their shifts in focus had to do with whomever was infusing money into the company at the time.
Recent Product Troubles
One of the things that has been quite concerning recently is a vulnerability in the software that runs the server part of the product. for long-time users that run their own content servers at home, you know that the only way you ever knew the server needed attention was if you loaded up a web browser and logged directly into the system and then accessed the Settings page. That is the only place the system ever showed any sort of notice that an update was even available. In many cases, installing that update required you to take manual steps to complete.
Apparently, many server owners had absolutely no idea that a vulnerability was discovered and an updated was released to address it. As a result of not knowing about the issue, plenty of owners never installed the udpated versions of the software and their systems ended up getting compromised. In fact, there are FOUR known vulnerabilities in Plex software that are actively being exploited “in the wild” – you can learn more about them from CISA at this link. The official information directly from Plex contained a little more detail but didn’t really call out the urgency of the issue, and you can read that here.
Read more: The State of PlexAnother major issue that is plaguing Plex right now is the absolutely terrible client they have released across all (?) platforms. The new interface represents a fairly decent shift in terms of look and feel, requires more clicks to get to the same places as before, and completely reset a number of user-defined parameters back to defaults (requiring the user to move them back to the same desired setting they had previously). There are also a number of reports of various bugs in the new client that either completely prevent certain features from working at all or degrade how they work. One of the more significant issues I have personally observed is the highly noticeable drop in visual quality of any content that was not originally sourced from at least a 720 or higher source. For example, I have a number of older TV Shows that I own the entire series of. I’ll offer The Golden Girls as an example. All of the source DVD’s have been ripped to MKV files and the visual quality is noticeably worse watching them using the Plex app on my Apple TV 4K (3rd gen) attached to my 4K Sony Bravia FALD TVs.
Before anyone pushes back on my experience, let me say for the record that watching this exact same content on the exact same TV using the exact same ATV device via either the Emby app, Infuse (connected to Emby), or via something like direct play access to the file via DLNA results in the quality being exactly what I am used to. Watching the same content with the new Plex app is noticeable degraded with a lot of artifacts being present much like if the 480 content were being upscaled first by the Plex app to something like 720 or 1080 and then again by the ATV / TV to full 4K. It has the sort of visual appearance you would expect if you were watching the content through a window that had water running down the pane.
Recent Internal Company Troubles (?)
Another thing of significant “concern” is that, now that the new client app seems to be released to all platforms, Plex has fired the entire Client App development team. They only had a couple of people still working on what is arguably the poorest quality client ever to hit the streets, but now they have zero. This essentially means there may well be absolutely no updates to this terrible client, or they may be heavily delayed until they arrange for a high school student that knows how to use AI to make updates (intended as sarcasm, but would be very disappointing if it held any truth).
The Likely Reality
Plex is beholden to investors. And they’re simply never going to be profitable even though they now charge more than FIVE TIMES what their licensing cost in the past (and this massive price hike happened earlier this year, all at once). The new price represents a desperate attempt to collect absolutely any money they can for a product that seems to be dying before our very eyes. If the investors DO recoup any of their monies, they’re just going to walk away and leave what’s left to turn to dust.
Unfortunately, Plex seems to be headed out and going quickly. I have already made the switch away to something else and will likely switch again simply because other pay-for products in this space are worse overall and almost certain to never reach the point Plex had made it to.
Alternatively, if people DO continue to sign up just for the ability to access and play the media content that Plex streams, then maybe they CAN stick around for a while longer. I doubt it, but we shall see. No matter what actually happens, I feel they are no longer interested at all in serving the audience that brought them this far.
What are your thoughts?