Plex is shutting down its media streaming services at the end of November. The company is making the move due to technical issues and cost concerns. After the cloud service is shut down, users will only be able to stream media via their own servers or local NAS.
“We have made the very difficult decision to end the Plex Cloud service on November 30, 2018,” the company said on its support page. “As you may know, we have disabled the creation of new accounts for Plex Cloud since February 2018, and since then we have been working intensively to resolve technical issues we are experiencing, while also trying to maintain a reasonable level of cost. We strive to maintain our standards as a company, and unfortunately, after extensive research and consideration, we were unable to find a solution that would allow our users to have a first-class experience at a reasonable cost.”
The company launched its Plex Cloud service in 2016 and supported Amazon Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive. However, it soon began to experience transcoding issues from these services, leading to the termination of its partnership with Amazon at the end of 2016.
Although Plex is concerned about how it will affect its subscribers, it says its main goal will be to improve and enrich the rest of Plex's features.
Podcasts and offline playback were recently added. Last year, DVR functionality was added for live TV channels, as well as options to record these programs for later playback.
