Makes me wonder if Plex might be thinking about running their own hosting service option? They already have streaming tv and movies right? Maybe they want to dip a toe in a hosting service for servers for users or something and wanted to whack the competition in the knee before starting.Įxactly right. A proxy server and they are back in business or they just move to a new host.
Plus they could report the users to whatever legal authority they want.īlocking the hosting company does nearly nothing productive past a few minutes/hours. Just have to work it into the terms of service, of course. They can then remotely disable the system. Or just implement triggers and some metadata reporting so if a server goes over 10 streams at a time it phones home to HQ and they can check if it is being used for paid piracy. 6 or 8 max streams and you wreck the business model for the ones making money off it. I would expect them to simply implement some thresholds on max simultaneous streamers or something. They may face complaints and lawsuits from Hetzner. Piracy neatly solves that and is of course free. This is a huge pain in the arse compared to just going to your cable company DVR's list of recorded content, it's a usability/QoL disaster. Since the major streaming services, Netflix in particular, refuse to allow platforms to index and link directly to their content, you need to go into each app individually to watch anything and use a third-party app like JustPlay to index the content you want to watch. Now that all the shows you want to watch are spread across in half a dozen apps, and everybody either has their hand out or forces you to watch ads, the overall experience is actually markedly lower quality than my old TiVo in 1999. Hulu was founded to make it easy for people to watch shows legally, either by watching ads or subscribing.
Most people just stream stuff from their home, shared with friends and family only, and if they don't have the upload bandwidth to do that they they simply don't.Īll these streaming platforms forgot why they exist in the first place. I doubt there are many people running colocated Plex servers that aren't using it to pirate, honestly. Once you go to 4K space requirements balloon, but we still aren't talking about a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. You can pirate every major show as it releases on TV and every streaming service in h.265 and fit a TON of shows in an 8TB HD if you grab 1080p.