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.
Hopefully they leave the free features as is, and don't starting going down the road many other companies have to squeeze out profit.
Agreed, but I have a feeling I'll be using Jellyfin in a few years.
Join us; It's fantastic.
Please put some love on the appletv app for the love of god. I had sworn off plex totally based on the jellyfin community evangelists. VERY quickly switched back when I couldn't even select which subtitle I wanted
I tried jellyfin for a short while but was so freaking annoyed by jellyfin users. Yes, I know you love your app but there are some large issues with it too, and I was shouted down repeatedly like I havent seen since Android v apple.
I experienced some of that gatekeeping too. "Oh I'm sorry, did you want a corporate streamer that let's you change your subtitles get lost corpo"
Exactly. It's not even for me but like, I have older family members who use it. I need it to be as easy for them to use as Plex is. Yes I know I can open the terminal and do x y and z, but they are going to just know "if I hit play it should play".
I'll give it another shot with this news, but yeah, was put off by them.
I mean yeah I would very happily move to Jellyfin. It just needs some time to cook. As of now it's got quite a bit of work to do.
You can't always wait for something to be great to join. Most FOSS products would die w/ that mentality. The larger the userbase, the more motivation to develop. Join, comment, engage, & help to build the best product. Or don't, up to you, but the community would love if you did.
I get that, but with a product I use in a near production environment I just can't swap over. I have users who use my server right now, it would be a process to swap them over to something that has feature parity. I keep jellyfin in a side environment right now, but until things are more baked in I can't swap over.
FOSS are not monolithic entities. Some individual with the knowledge, skills and free time has to be willing to work on those things. Most people who develop certain features in open source, do so because of a personal interest. If you don't have the skills yourself, you can go find whoever maintains that app or someone willing to contribute and drop them a donation for their continued effort.
Monolithic tech giants accostumed people to pay for services with their private data and attention. As the past year has proven, this wasn't a healthy arrangement and the comeuppance was way overdue. Contribute to the solution, don't just complain about the problem.
Good points, and I try as hard as I can not to be that guy who complains about free community driven software. I see that and I absolutely hate it. That said, if I have a FOSS offering vs a Corpo offering, and the FOSS project has no resources or desire to put resources towards something the corpo offering already has, I will go with the corpos, ethics be damned.
Try emby, much better than jellyfin for me. I had an issue that jellyfin wasn't able to reproduce some of the series that I was watching, or it had severe issues. I had zero issues with emby.
I'll give it a shot. I had written it off before for reasons I don't remember off the top of my head.
edit: oh that's right, it's paid. I'll stick with the free stuff
Sure thing. I had some issues with jellyfin transpiling some series, the Android TV app was unable to skip forward for example, and sometimes it stopped reproducing (WiFi issues, sure but they didn't happen with emby). I only had to pay like 5€ total for the android app, and the server is completely free. I would switch to jellyfin if their streaming app / service were as good, but being the only one in the household that cares, having already paid the single payment to emby and being the one that has to fix issues on movie night while my partner is side eyeing me for changing shit again, I won't bother for a good while
(^_^')Edit: Just tested jellyfin with some random animes I have. the AndroidTV app isn't as seamless as the Android app, and changing subtitles can only be done inside the app, it pauses the app for like 3-4 seconds and forwarding takes 3-4 seconds too. Sadly, it's not a quality experience. This is really weird since the TV is connected through cable to the server and the phone isn't, but all the mentioned issues don't happen on the pone. I might have to sideload the android app and see how it works.
Hahaheheheh, aaahhhhh...
wipes eyes
Anyway, thanks for the morning chuckle.
If they're trying to appease shareholders, then I feel like the enshittification is just starting. I've got Emby Premiere (webhooks were paywalled and are quite useful) and like that I have an off-ramp to Jellyfin if they start heading down a similar path.