I remember when Plex was much more customizable, had plugins, and fully offline functionality.

When Apple TV relented and started supporting Plex, all of those features were striped away. UI customizability was the first to go, and you couldn’t even hold on to old versions because they were force updated and now required internet to work at all.

Then came the injection of ad supported streams that show up in searches as ‘movies and TV shows’ and my mother asks me why there are so many commercials because outside nonsense was reenabled on her app after an update. Adding channels to users screens and frequently re-enabling things despite users explicitly trying to disable them while requiring everything to be online all the time is not a good sign.

I love Plex. I have been a lifetime member for over ten years and building my homelab has been a fantastic learning experience and now career that would not have happened if I didn’t get into Plex. It’s a wonderful product, I do fear that lifetime members like myself are not driving the economic interests of the company though. They’ve already got my money, and to be fair I got much more than I paid for.