Plex Debuts New 'Plex Cloud' Beta Service for Accessing Media Anywhere

[MacRumors]

Plex today announced the debut of a new Plex Cloud service, which is designed to allow Plex users to store their media in the cloud so it's accessible anywhere without the need to set up a local server.

Amazon Drive allows users to create an always-on Plex Media Server that can stream any media content to any device with Plex installed in 60 seconds or less. As with a local server, media is organized through the Plex app for quick access to TV shows, movies, music, pictures, and more.

To use Plex Cloud, Plex customers will need to subscribe to Amazon Drive, Amazon's unlimited cloud storage offering. Amazon Drive is priced at $60 per year and will allow Plex users to store as many files as they would like with no size limits.

The service also requires a Plex Pass, priced at $4.99 per month, $39.99 per year, or $149.99 for lifetime usage.

At the current time, the Plex Cloud service is available to Plex Pass customers who sign up to beta test the feature. It is an invite-only beta test and will be limited to a select number of Plex Pass users.

Article Link: Plex Debuts New 'Plex Cloud' Beta Service for Accessing Media Anywhere

 

[arggg14]

Too expensive. I'll just set up a server at home and be done.

 

[Christoffee]

Personally, I love Plex. But I'm a little baffled by how this is becoming a mainstream piece of kit that requires you to rip DVDs, which is legally questionable at best. And now they're promoting you putting these ripped DVDs unencrypted on a file sharing service.

 

[Capt Crunch]

Too expensive. I'll just set up a server at home and be done.

A dedicated server is pretty expensive too... not to mention many people's upload speeds are ~5 mbps which isn't really enough to reliably stream to devices outside your network. To me, this is a fantastic thing, with the very notable exception that you're putting media unencrypted up on the cloud.

 

[Crazy Badger]

Be interesting to see how Amazon react when people start putting TB's of pirated media into their Cloud services, and then using Plex to share them with family and friends

 

[profets]

Personally, I love Plex. But I'm a little baffled by how this is becoming a mainstream piece of kit that requires you to rip DVDs, which is legally questionable at best. And now they're promoting you putting these ripped DVDs unencrypted on a file sharing service.

I love Plex as well, but I agree, I'm a bit confused as to how much they're pushing forward. Let's be honest, Plex shines for libraries of non-DRM media, and though I'm sure many people are happy to rip blurays, I have to imagine that the majority are using it with pirated content.

 

[Nozuka]

Too expensive. I'll just set up a server at home and be done.

and the server is free? and what about electricity?

 

[ps45]

I love Plex as well, but I agree, I'm a bit confused as to how much they're pushing forward. Let's be honest, Plex shines for libraries of non-DRM media, and though I'm sure many people are happy to rip blurays, I have to imagine that the majority are using it with pirated content.

Particularly because a common format of choice for people who rip their BluRays for convenience purposes (ISOs) is not even supported by Plex. Not that they would be much use in a cloud streaming situation, I'd imagine.

 

[jmitch720]

This seems like a neat service but if you're ripping blu-rays with MakeMKV and then not compressing them further, the idea of uploading 20GB files is daunting. I'll likely stick with my current Direct Attached Storage device and call it a day. It is tempting though.
[doublepost=1474916516][/doublepost]

I love Plex as well, but I agree, I'm a bit confused as to how much they're pushing forward. Let's be honest, Plex shines for libraries of non-DRM media, and though I'm sure many people are happy to rip blurays, I have to imagine that the majority are using it with pirated content.

Yeah Plex starts to break down when you attempt to describe it to someone who's never heard of it. "It organizes your movies." "Movies from where?" "Ripped from discs and...elsewhere." They tend to check out at that point.

 

[Paradoxally]

and the server is free? and what about electricity?

Raspberry Pi is an option. It's cheap and works well as a Plex server if no transcoding is needed. Power consumption is minimal and your hard drive will consume a lot more.

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

Includes special NSA access

 

[benjitek]

Probably a good time to review the Amazon Cloud Drive privacy statement...

 

[jmitch720]

Probably a good time to review the Amazon Cloud Drive privacy statement...

An interesting note from Section 1.2 "You may not use the Service to store, transfer or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service, or to resell any part of the Service."

I assume Plex confirmed this service will work with Amazon, but it's still a bit...unusual.

 

[iMerik]

Personally, I love Plex. But I'm a little baffled by how this is becoming a mainstream piece of kit that requires you to rip DVDs, which is legally questionable at best. And now they're promoting you putting these ripped DVDs unencrypted on a file sharing service.

I will never speak out against ripping ones own media to non-DRM files. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/ https://www.eff.org/issues/drm

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Seems a lot of time would be needed to upload most libraries. Days of uploading when there is already plenty of bandwidth needed to keep CrashPlan and other cloud backup sync'd.

 

[apolloa]

$150 for lifetime use is an utter bargain! Way cheaper then buying dedicated hardware. BUT this is if you use Amazon Drive already of course. Will be interesting to see if it's integrated with the new Fire TV devices out soon.

 

[thisisnotmyname]

Personally, I love Plex. But I'm a little baffled by how this is becoming a mainstream piece of kit that requires you to rip DVDs, which is legally questionable at best. And now they're promoting you putting these ripped DVDs unencrypted on a file sharing service.

I'm honestly really surprised they haven't been targeted by MPAA or such. Being able to share your entire library with friends and have them access your media at will seems like it would attract their attention.

 

[neuropsychguy]

An interesting note from Section 1.2 "You may not use the Service to store, transfer or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service, or to resell any part of the Service."

I assume Plex confirmed this service will work with Amazon, but it's still a bit...unusual.

It's not unusual. You upload your files. You give Plex software access to those files to manage the playback of the files (okay under Section 1.4). Nothing breaks any of the terms of use.

 

[ScottishDuck]

I can very easily see trying to watch a movie on this service and finding it was taken down by a copyright claim

 

[wlossw]

I signed up for the beta... can't wait to upload my 12tb of "home movies"...

 

[bladerunner2000]

They wont get a lot of sales in Canada, the internet speeds there are almost as bad as Australia's. Fastest upload speed I can get from my ISP is 10Mbps.

This is all thanks to Canadian government allowing the Bell / Rogers oligopoly.

 

[wlossw]

They wont get a lot of sales in Canada, the internet speeds there are almost as bad as Australia's. Fastest upload speed I can get from my ISP is 10Mbps.

This is all thanks to Canadian government allowing the Bell / Rogers oligopoly.

I have 120 down/20mbps up here in Montreal with videotron, and bell fibe has even faster tiers. The real internet shame in Canada is how crappy rural broadband is... I have 5 down .5 up at my cottage, and it costs 100 bucks a month.

 

[arggg14]

and the server is free? and what about electricity?

I guess I was thinking long term. One could set up a nice little Synology box with a few TB's of storage for less than $400.

 

[benjitek]

An interesting note from Section 1.2 "You may not use the Service to store, transfer or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service, or to resell any part of the Service."
I assume Plex confirmed this service will work with Amazon, but it's still a bit...unusual.

Sounds like wording to prohibit sharing or selling access to files you have stored there, but not really for your files for personal streaming via Plex. Not sure how that gels with PlexPass accounts which have created sub-user accounts -- though I doubt Amazon would have any way of discerning which user is logged into Plex and accessing media files.

Personally, I think users should just be aware that Amazon has access to your files and to think twice about storing questionable stuff possibly obtained with a torrent client. Unrelated to Plex, but a few years ago I uploaded an episode of something to my sister's OneDrive account so she could watch it while travelling. About a week later she got a warning letter from Microsoft regarding storing copyrighted files on the service referencing that episode with a 'request' to immediately remove it. Thankfully, it was just a warning and nothing came of it. Won't be doing that again, on any cloud service...

 

[cookies!]

Too expensive. I'll just set up a server at home and be done.

Not really.

Let's do some napkin math with some pretty generous cost assumptions in your favor. I'm also going to assume that Plex Cloud customers have no data caps, fast internet, and a need for a lot of storage.

I'm not up to date on server costs, but I'd imagine it is around $500 to buy the case, CPU for transcoding, the central guts (motherboard etc.) and all of those hard drives (I currently need 3TB for Plex, so that's 6TB in RAID 1). I don't think those little NAS boxes on Amazon can transcode, so I don't think they are an option here. Assuming the server is built powerful enough to run those big 4K files of the future, you can probably amortize it for 5 years. Let's just say $100 per year.

If you keep your server on for convenience, (like most people do since it is a server), you are dropping an average of $10 a month for the power alone. So let's say about $90 a year since I'm sure that new CPUs are very efficient.

Then add in maintenance costs, which can be anywhere from $10 for a blown fan to the failure of a hard drive that costs $70. Let's assume that one component fails every 2 years, so let's say $25 a year in maintenance costs.

So on average you will pay $215 per year to have that server for five years. And I'll give you a 25% discount on top of that because this is napkin math and I'm drunk. So $160 per year, sound fair?

With Plex Cloud I'll save $60 every year, and I'll save a ton of time not dealing with all of the above. Even if you have perfect luck when it comes to things breaking, I don't think there is any question that this will cost more than the old fashion way of having your old server. The question is whether it will actually work.

I'm skeptical that Amazon will store many terabytes per customer when the average customer uses under 100GB. I'm skeptical that they won't mind if people uploading pirated media en masse. And while I have a gigabit fiber line, I'm really skeptical that very high bitrate 4K streams will be feasible from Amazon's end, cost-wise (many Plex users don't care about ridiculous bitrates, of course). But this is a beta to test scaling-up, so I don't think Plex minds the skepticism

Given that I like to stream my media at a very high bitrate, especially when it comes to 4K, I'm probably going to stay with my server I'll still gladly try this out though! Honestly, I should probably just use a Bluray player instead.

Also I just edited a bunch of stuff due to aforementioned drunkenness