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Two-years-old Plex Cloud Service will shut down in November
- Plex Cloud will shut down on November 30, 2018.
- Plex launched Plex Cloud as a way for users to serve media from cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox.
- The two-years-old service had a rocky start, and Plex says it was unable to sustain the program.
If you use the Plex Cloud service to store your totally legal, absolutely 100 percent legitimate media files, we unfortunately have some bad news: Plex will discontinue Plex Cloud starting on November 30, 2018.
The company sent a message to its users today informing them of the termination of Plex Cloud. The message includes the reasoning behind the change, which stems mostly from figuring out cost-effective ways to run the service at the caliber Plex users expect from the company.
A partial excerpt from the message is below:
We’ve been actively working on ways to address various issues while keeping costs under control. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven’t found a solution capable of delivering a truly first-class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost. While we are super bummed about the impact this will have on our happy Cloud users, ending support for it will allow us to focus on improving core functionality, adding new features and content, and delivering on our mission to provide a world-class product that we can all rely on and enjoy.
Using Plex Cloud, customers could stream media from anywhere without having to own an always-on computer or NAS to host their media files. Instead, they could upload their media to their cloud service of choice — such as Google Drive or Dropbox — and then stream the files via Plex Cloud from anywhere.
While this sounds fairly simple, Plex has its own servers that transcode the media from the cloud servers hosted by the other providers, and this is likely where the cost problems come into play.
Plex Cloud launched in beta at the end of 2016 and then became a stable service in early 2017. It seems that Plex gave the service a fair shot, but is pulling the plug to not get buried too deep trying to make the service work.
Those of you who use Plex for streaming content from a dedicated machine that you own won’t see any service disruptions or changes from the removal of Plex Cloud. However, the removal of the service might make it tough for people who don’t or can’t own a dedicated machine to start using Plex.