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Plex announced today the closure of its troubled Plex Cloud service, via a forum post that did not find its place on the company's official blog – probably a choice that the company has made to minimize the news or avoid the media. Plex Cloud, launched in the fall of 2016, was supposed to allow Plex customers to save their files to online storage services such as OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, without having to host their locally saved files on their own machines or networks. . connected storage devices.
But now it will not be an option anymore, as the service will stop working on November 30, 2018, says Plex.
Plex Cloud had from the beginning had technical problems.
Almost immediately, its first launch partner, Amazon, stopped working with Plex Cloud. Users complained of the inability to access Amazon Drive files and wondered if Amazon imposed download limits. There were also concerns that Plex Cloud users whose libraries included pirated movies and TV shows could put themselves at risk by posting these files on the cloud.
Unlike Plex's Cloud Sync, which synchronizes selected local media to the cloud for access when the local server is offline, Plex Cloud is a full-fledged Plex media server in the cloud. This meant that the media was hosted independently of local storage and had been transcoded to be compatible with Plex reader applications, as needed.
This led to technical challenges that Plex was unable to overcome, even though he sometimes refused to explain the challenges Plex Cloud faced.
The company admitted last March that the problems encountered were very difficult.
"It's not an easy task to use the world's best multimedia server and make it work as a scalable, load-balanced, cloud-based cloud service in multiple geographies. It may be that many things go wrong, "admitted a blog.
In February 2018, Plex announced the deactivation of the creation of new servers for Plex Cloud users – which he said he had to do while working on the performance, quality and overall user experience inherent in cloud provider integrations.
At the time, he stated that he would "evaluate the long-term plan for the service".
The subtext, of course, was that Plex Cloud could be shut down if Plex could not solve technical problems.
Today, unfortunately, that day.
Plex claims that it tried to solve the problems that arose while controlling costs, but did not find a solution.
The announcement states:
We made the difficult decision to stop the Plex Cloud service on November 30, 2018. As you may know, we have not authorized new Plex Cloud servers since February of this year and since then we have been actively working on ways to solve various problems while controlling costs. We remain at a high level and, unfortunately, after much investigation and thought, we have not found a solution that can provide a first-class Plex experience for Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost. While we are disappointed with the impact this will have on our lucky cloud users, the end of support will allow us to focus on improving core functionality, adding new features and new ones we can all rely on and enjoy.
On November 30, 2018, Plex Cloud users will no longer be able to access their cloud server. This means that customers who wish to continue streaming these files via Plex will need to download them locally to a media server or NAS device on their local network.
Of course, Plex will not delete files you've downloaded to cloud services, such as Dropbox or Google Drive. They will stay there as long as you have a subscription to these services.
While the loss of Plex Cloud will be destabilizing for Plex users who appreciate trouble-free service, the company's decision to close rather than solve problems is indicative of Plex's new focus in recent months.
Originally a software application designed to house users' personal media collections, Plex has since launched its own tools for watching live TV via an antenna and recording shows on a digital recorder to attract the growing number of cable cutters. It has also launched podcast support and deployed custom applications to attract more mobile users.
It is not clear how the Plex teams managed to attract new users and paying subscribers because the company did not disclose this last figure. In May, Plex reported having 15 million registered users.
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