Surely this won’t inevitably lead to them feeling the need to sunset the features that made them what they are.
Doubt that store would ever be able to compete with all the other services. They try to diversify which makes sense. And if they do stupid things? Well, alternatives already exist, so I am not too worried in the slightest. They put in quite some serious effort into their music player Plexamp with AI features for local music very recently.
Sigh, are the Jellyfin apps any good yet or am I going to have to deal with even more Plex advertising for a while?
I think we can safely assume that “pretty major UX updates” means pushing the services they want us to use over user preferences
Well this is concerning. I like Plex’s feature suit but chasing profits can lead down an enshittified rabbit hole.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Plex, known for its media server software and as a place to watch ad-supported content, is going to launch a store for to buy and rent movies and TV shows in early February, executives told Lowpass’ Janko Roettgers.
“Most studios” are lined up for the store’s launch, and there are “plans to complete the catalog soon after,” Roettgers says.
The new store will mark a major addition for Plex, especially following the company’s layoff of 20 percent of its staff in June 2023.
At the time, the company’s CEO told staffers that Plex’s ad business had been “significantly impacted” by a downturn in global advertising markets, but chief product officer Scott Olechowski told Roettgers that its ad business is growing.
Olechowski said that the company has a “pretty major UX refresh” in the works to help support the many people using Plex to watch ad-supported movies and TV shows and FAST (free, ad-supported streaming) channels.
(Roettgers says that Plex updated some of the feature’s onboarding processes, and Plex senior product and design director Jason Williams told him that the backlash “kind of vanished pretty quickly afterwards.”)
The original article contains 270 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 31%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
