3 ms·

Plex can be amazing, but the core user community has absolutely no idea what the heck the Plex devs are doing these days. I've almost never seen such a disconne

by bane 3y ago

Plex can be amazing, but the core user community has absolutely no idea what the heck the Plex devs are doing these days. I've almost never seen such a disconnect between product development and key user community. /r/plex is basically full of posts complaining about long-standing requests, bugs, and broken features that are just simply ignore, followed by posts of "plex just released new feature literally nobody is asking for or wants, wtf?" Most of the WTF feature releases are rolled back or deprecated within a few releases. So the community tends to be right on with what Plex should be doing. There's a lot of pigheadedness on the engineering side it looks like. I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move. I think a better model would have been something like "pay $45, get every release in this major version, new major versions come out approximately every year" or with an alternate tier that would be "use plex, pay $35 per year, get all the updates". It would have smoothed out revenue and focused development on paying customer demands.

i_am_jl 3y ago
>I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move. As someone with a lifetime PlexPass, I also think it's a terrible move. I'm starting to regret signing up with a company that allows that sort of purchase. It underlies all of the problems I have with Plex. Lifetime membership sounds great, but it changes the nature of my relationship with Plex. If I pay a subscription I'm a customer; I use their services but I pay more in a subscription than I cost them, everyone is happy with the arrangement. But while I'm coasting off of my $79 Lifetime Plex Pass that I bought years ago I'm not a customer, I don't represent a revenue stream, I represent a growing cost. I've paid for them to provide a service, but I've also incentivized them to change the service in a way that I use it less, because me using the service costs them money. That dynamic explains the problems I have with Plex. It explains why they're seemingly incapable (unwilling) to fix long standing bugs, and it explains the development of features that their base doesn't want (because Live TV, rental, and gaming represent new markets with new potential subscribers)

by bane 3y ago

i_am_jl 3y ago

>I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move. As someone with a lifetime PlexPass, I also think it's a terrible move. I'm starting to regret signing up with a company that allows that sort of purchase. It underlies all of the problems I have with Plex. Lifetime membership sounds great, but it changes the nature of my relationship with Plex. If I pay a subscription I'm a customer; I use their services but I pay more in a subscription than I cost them, everyone is happy with the arrangement. But while I'm coasting off of my $79 Lifetime Plex Pass that I bought years ago I'm not a customer, I don't represent a revenue stream, I represent a growing cost. I've paid for them to provide a service, but I've also incentivized them to change the service in a way that I use it less, because me using the service costs them money. That dynamic explains the problems I have with Plex. It explains why they're seemingly incapable (unwilling) to fix long standing bugs, and it explains the development of features that their base doesn't want (because Live TV, rental, and gaming represent new markets with new potential subscribers)