I consistently argue that the issue with Plex is not income, but desperately attempting to rebrand as a “legitimate” media centre.

Look at the marketing materials and features from the last few years: Specifically trying to avoid any thought of pirated content.

That’s hardly surprising. Running an ad campaign of “a great place to store all your illegal downloads” doesn’t seem like a wise strategy.

The core problem is that Plex is a business, with investors. Depending on pirated content is not a good model for business success, so they’re trying to pivot. IMO Jellyfin has it right: a non profit, open source solution.

I don't know if it's related to Jellyfin becoming a more viable competitor, but Plex has improved a lot recently. Sync/Downloads are better, the TV apps got a much nicer layout. The metadata agents got updated to be faster. I've been pretty happy lately.

> I consistently argue that the issue with Plex is not income, but desperately attempting to rebrand as a “legitimate” media centre.

If they are low on income due to non-recurring life-time purchases (which I have made myself), and the streaming thingies offered is a income-driver...

I say it's both.

> Look at the marketing materials and features from the last few years: Specifically trying to avoid any thought of pirated content.

I realize this may not reflect the majority use-case, but using Plex for non-pirated content it's still absolutely something people do.

Personally on my Plex-server, I host Photos from all the family, music I've purchased either digitally, or ripped from CDs I own, more accessible copies of DVDs/Bluerays I've also bought and owned, not to mention other DRM-free movies, media and various courses I've bought online.

In my jurisdiction none of this is illegal, and using Plex to manage that media makes managing that media-collection so much better. Why everyone assumes Plex can only be used for pirated contents beats me.

Plex just works(tm), everywhere, no matter what I feed it, and I remember with great dismay how things used to be before I had Plex.

The day Jellyfin gets good enough, I might switch, because it's FOSS and I like FOSS, but for the time being, the simplicity and just-works-ness of Plex means I'll stick around.

> In my jurisdiction none of this is illegal, and using Plex to manage that media makes managing that media-collection so much better. Why everyone assumes Plex can only be used for pirated contents beats me.

This is a great point, and part of what I feel has been the core of the issue with Plex. Back when it started, they argued publicly that serving your own purchased content for personal use was morally (and should be legally) right. Yes, there were always people who shared things illegally using Plex (and sometimes on a large scale), but Plex themselves continued to work with the goal of letting people consume their own format-shifted content. Absolutely people still do it, but it's clear that Plex is no longer working for those people or working with that ability as a goal.

Emby does lifetime purchases and hasn’t don’t the stuff plex has