Jhex comments on 4 reasons Plex is turning into the thing it replaced

[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this.

Greed... do you really need 3 more?

Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?

Plex is a private company wanting money... Jellyfin is a voluteer-drive effort

Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?

Enshitification happens to privately develop products due to greed... Jellyfin is not a private company pushing a product for profit

We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.

Back to "greed"

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[–] scarabic@lemmy.world -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.

Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?

Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)

the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow

See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?

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[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 1 point 11 months ago* (1 child)

Nobody outside Plex's finance department is going to have what you're looking for if those examples are anything to go by.

What it comes down to is they have $130M that investors are going to want back and all the decisions they're making now are aimed at doing so. That doesn't mean any of those decisions are good or are going to work. It didn't even mean they won't backfire and have the opposite effect.

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[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 1 point 11 months ago

Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.