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Plex Launches Movie Rental Store
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Ownership will be scrubbed out for those that dont own the means of production ☹️
I moved to Emby several years ago specifically because of this type of stuff. I’m sure Plex will be heavily advertising it within their client apps.
This just looks like them being diversifying their revenue stream, which IMO is a good thing for their long-term viability.
I have a lot of gripes about their server software and other decisions they made, but their client apps are pretty solid. Their open-source competitor, Jellyfin, has the opposite problem whereby the server component is great but the client apps (especially on Apple devices) just aren’t quite there yet.
Everybody hates on NFTs (probably because of all the scams and useless implementations) but they could usher-in an age of digital ownership which would disrupt virtually every media industry.
Owning and trading digital assets like movies, shows, video games, and software?! Whichever major publisher rolls it out in a user friendly and reliable format will dominate.
None of the big players want to because the status quo is so much more profitable, and none of the small players can afford the massive costs of building and maintaining such a system.
There will be one big player who sees the opportunity though… hopefully…
I want to own my digital games and movies - don’t you?
(and no I’m not referring at all to jpegs or gifs)
Same for me except I moved to Jellyfin. Going through now and re-ripping all my Blu-ray and 4K UHD physical media in raw, lossless to my NAS and enjoying the peace of mind that everything's behind the firewall, absolutely zero cloud dependencies, nobody's monitoring my viewing activity, and it all works just fine even if the internet goes down.
It's not as polished as Plex, but the upsides are absolutely outweighing the downsides for my uses.
Exactly this.
Witness what happened with purchased content from Sony's PlayStation.
PlayStation Store removes purchased movies from libraries after service shutdown
Affected titles include Paddington and John Wick.
www.theverge.com
PlayStation Will Delete Purchased Discovery Shows
Sony said that the Discovery shows, including “MythBusters” and “Deadliest Catch,” would be deleted from the devices on Dec. 31, citing “content licensing arrangements with content providers.”
Maybe if you had rented a movie in the past 10 years you would know how it works. It you want to watch a film in a cinema or rent a brand new release, it's expensive. Or you can wait a little while and rent it for $5-$7 or even less. You even get 99c rentals of big films.
It’s interesting that Plex is getting into a business that big players like Sony have recently exited because Apple, Amazon, Google and Vudu basically have the market locked up.
I've got a Hackintosh running my Plex server and my TV playing back my movies from my Nvidia Shield.
It's honestly a killer setup; super fast, reliable, lots of expansion capabilities, the shield also has USB ports in case things go really wrong to playback my stuff (Apple TV is a joke in this regard) and it's even better giving Apple the finger with the Hackintosh.
It's honestly a killer setup; super fast, reliable, lots of expansion capabilities, the shield also has USB ports in case things go really wrong to playback my stuff (Apple TV is a joke in this regard) and it's even better giving Apple the finger with the Hackintosh.
What stuff? Plex offering live tv or rentals doesn't affect a Plex user running the server. Said person doesn't even have to worry about seeing the live tv screen or other parts of Plex not readily used.
This is poorly worded. It made it sound like you could rent a movie, or purchase a movie (buy it and own it).
I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I mostly rent movies because I figure I won’t likely watch it more than once. I do buy some that I like watching over and over but those are pretty rare.
Smart users moved to Emby long ago. No internet reliance was huge for me and made me give up on Plex when my internet went down and no access to my library locally.
Everything about Emby is vastly superior at this point. Especially hardware decoding via GPU.
Interface is flawless along with flawless direct play or transcode playback. Emby has tons of great clients on basically every platform. LG and most TV's, Roku, Apple TV, Chrome TV, Fire TV, Shield, Xbox, Browser and well basically everything.
Everything about Emby is vastly superior at this point. Especially hardware decoding via GPU.
Interface is flawless along with flawless direct play or transcode playback. Emby has tons of great clients on basically every platform. LG and most TV's, Roku, Apple TV, Chrome TV, Fire TV, Shield, Xbox, Browser and well basically everything.
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No big deal to me, I paid when Plex 1st came out, long ago. As long as they stay in business & let me use their Channel guide for my Antenna, I'm cool... Oh, and stay in business 
I turned off all the features of Plex that aren’t streaming locally stored content years ago and frankly I don’t think I’d know how to turn it all back on.
Depends on the movie. Because Barbie is relatively new it's expensive.
Newer movies range from $10-ish to $20.
Older released less than $6 or $5 and Apple often has rental sales for like $1.99 or sometimes $0.99 if I'm remembering correctly.
Not that different than how rental stores used to work (at least in my country IDK about the US).