I wouldn’t be so sure if that. It’s possible, yeah, but if my theory is right they see the library sharing as the carrot to get normies to download the plex app onto their roku or apple TV.

Pivoting to a streaming only app would close off that avenue for user acquisition permanently.

I was trying to think how Plex thinks this is going to play out, knowing that this move will piss off their customer base. Then I realized, this isn’t a play for Plex’s existing customer base. This is a play for their customer’s “friends and family” that are enjoying shared libraries already.

Their ‘customer’ base has for many many years been developing a large user base of technologically naive people with Plex apps installed who could never run their own server. If Plex knows, for example, that for every paying customer there’s three other users pulling from someone’s library, that’s a huge opportunity for them to convert those users to paying customers.

Everyone that set up a Plex server and then shared it with your tech-phobic parents, cousins, friends, etc… We made this possible.

I don’t like it but I can’t argue with the logic from Plex here.

-edit- Tightened up the grammar.

It’s not just that. If the Pi Foundation has to make a choice between fulfilling an order for 100 pis for a company so that the company can keep making products and meeting payroll vs. 100 hobbyists that want to make their own one-off project, which is the more moral use of resources?

Yeah, those companies should probably not have chosen a pi board to power their products but that’s only noticeable in hindsight.