Sorry to rain on your day, Plex Cloud is going away
If you’re not familiar with Plex Cloud, it’s the completely online version of Plex Media Server that served your content from a cloud storage provider such as Google Drive, Onedrive, or Dropbox. It’s going away on November 30th, 2018.
Issues that plagued Plex Cloud are not laid out in their discontinue notification. We can speculate – the sheer amount of processor power and bandwidth required to transcode, the very high number of people getting notification that their content was removed from a service provider due to being copywritten material, outages, rate limiting, and I’m guessing a user experience that’s completely out of Plex’s hands, and a need to charge a lot more to make it work.
I also wonder since Plex was serving up so much user pirated material (yeah, I’ve read the forums,) and effectively redistributing content without a license (even if the user recorded it,) that they were worried that safe harbor protections might not protect them.
Anyway, Plex is not going away, and there’s probably no reason to worry about how they’re doing other than that they blew some cash sending a certain blogger an antenna.
It should also be noted that Plex Cloud is not Cloud Sync, which I totally mixed up in my mind until this line. You can still cloud sync, which means your media sits on the cloud and can be served to you even if your local server is offline. If your local Plex is offline, transcoding cannot happen, so hopefully you’re good trying to watch that 24 gigabyte copy of Deadpool 2 you pushed to Google Drive under the name Deathstroke 2 on your phone during lunch break.
What do you think? Did you use Plex Cloud? Cloud Sync? Are you losing anything here? Did anyone actually use it?
[Plex]
