Plex, the free streaming app, laid off approximately 20% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned, which will affect all departments, including the Personal Media teams.
“This is by far the hardest decision we’ve had to make at Plex,” CEO Keith Valory said in a statement. “These are all wonderful people, great colleagues, and good friends. But we believe it is the right thing for the long-term health and stability of Plex.”
The streaming app gives users a single destination to upload and organize content (video, audio and photos) from their own server while also allowing them to stream it via mobile app, smart TV or desktop.
In recent years, however, Plex has invested in free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) and live TV offerings. The FAST market has become saturated as many companies have entered the space. Plus, the overall advertising industry has taken a hit, making it harder for companies to earn enough revenue.
Valory noted in his statement that the company was significantly impacted by the slowdown. “While we adjusted our business plan last year after the shift in equity markets to get us back on a path to profitability without having to cut personnel expenses, the downturn in the ad market in Q2 put significantly more pressure on our business and ultimately it became clear that we would need to take additional measures in order to maintain a confident path to profitability within the next 18 months,” he said.
He added that the company is still expected to see 30% growth this year.
According to a Slack message from Valory, obtained by The Verge, which first reported the layoffs, Valory noted that 37 employees would be impacted.
Additionally, it seems that Plex may have had another round of layoffs earlier this year. Five months ago, a former account executive posted on LinkedIn that they were “affected by company layoffs.”
As of January, the company had 175 employees, and its revenue was in the double-digit millions.
Updated 6/29/23 at 12:10 p.m. ET with a statement from CEO.
I only still have a plex server running for audiobook support with the app Prologue. Everything else is happy in Jellyfin and and has been rock solid. Plex went way to corporate and it creeped me out.
Copy/paste mostly from another reply I made:
I have a huge audiobook library, I was fully prepared to do all the processes to move and organize my mess of a library to get it working with Plex. I’m sure you’ve seen the GitHub guide floating around.
But when it came time to sit down and configure my server for audiobooks, ebooks, tv, movies, and music, I found that audiobookshelf just did a way better job with less of a headache. My current stack is Beet.io with audible support to move my already downloaded library into a better folder and naming structure. Once I get those all finished I won’t have to use this step. This gets stuff about ~80% of the way there except when the source is really messed up.
From there I have Readarr looking at the Beets destination folder and managing downloads. This is pretty good for getting most of the rest of the info with some clean up and is similar to setting up other Arrs. Then audiobookshelf for final tweaks and browsing/downloading.
It’s quite a pain to ingest an initial large library but for new downloads it’s been pretty seamless. Way easier and more consistent than having to do most of this anyway plus fight with Plex.
The audiobookshelf library is really great and can pull audiobook specific information from a lot of sources automatically. You can browse by series or narrator or genre too and if you listen through their app or through the browser it syncs your progress which is nice.
The audiobookshelf app is pretty good for browsing and downloading but I don’t like the player as much as my usual one. But you can just point the download at whatever folder your favorite player uses.
Since you’re already using Plex for audiobooks you can probably skip all these steps straight to audiobookshelf if your folder structure already matches
https://beets.io
I’ve tried Audiobookshelf and it just wasnt for me. I hadn’t used Beet with it, but my issue was never really the organization part, more the playback part. I can’t remember exactly what features were lacking in ABS, but I do remember being disappointed in it. To the point where I spun up a dedicated plex server JUST for my audiobooks, and to since then, I’ve been incredibly happy with the UX.
I didn’t know that beets supports books. I used that tool like… honestly at least a decade ago to organize a giant music library I had, and it was a great tool. Thanks for sharing!
Also, I just wish Jellyfin supported audiobooks in the same manner that Plex does. Then I’d be back to one media server running.
I hadn’t heard of Prologue and it looks amazing, unfortunately it’s not on Android.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.mattpvaughn.chronicle
If I remember correctly, I think I’ve read there is an Android equivalent. Prologue is pretty flawless.
There doesn’t appear to be an Android version of this specific app, so it would have to be under a different name.
Check out Chronicle: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.mattpvaughn.chronicle Haven’t used it much, but my experience has been flawless.
There’s also Bookcamp: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.bookcamp.android, but I think that’s subscription based.
Plex DMCA’d my private server a few months ago.
So I cancelled my Plex Pass and moved on to greener pastures.
They seem to be doing everything they can to get rid of their foundational userbase so they can attract… Ad supported free TV watchers?..
What morons are running the show in Silicon Valley?
Wait, what? What were you seeding?
Seriously, I’ve never heard of Plex giving a shit what you share on a private server. So much so that people sell access to their servers. Makes me wonder if our boy here was up to something more illegal than piracy. 💀
I would expect that to get you a knock on the door, not a DMCA notice, as DMCA notices require someone to claim copyright
There are a ton of Plex servers that sell access to their libraries to make some money back. They’re generally called “Plex Shares” on the internet (and, while I don’t want to point people to Reddit I know that r/plexshares is a thing, for example).
So there are a lot of services that have all of their Plex servers point to one enormous library and then they sell access. It’s basically Netflix, but through Plex.
Plead has definitely been cracking down on this recently. Especially around last Christmas I was seeing servers banned every day. I assume this is what OP was doing, selling access to their server and Plex caught on. I know you mentioned selling access to servers but I’m guessing it depends on scale. Maybe OP Got big enough to be on Plex’s radar. One of the sites I use has thousands of users, 24/7 support, etc. It’s a whole business. I think this is what Plex has been trying to stop
Agreed… Absolutely insane if true