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.
This doesn’t surprise me. The “features” that keep being added to Plex drive me nuts. I just want to be able to browse and watch from my own library.
Those features are what bring in revenue and I don’t blame them for trying to be profitable. You can only get so far on lifetime subscriptions.
As long as they don’t abandon the core product so I can continue using it as the awesome media server that it is I have no complaints. They can add all the additional features they want.
DVR, commercial skip, intro and credit detection, plexpy etc… are all awesome features which have been added in the last 5 years or so and enhance the core product.
I don’t have anything bad to say of Plex as a company, and I wish them luck on their endeavor, but if they ever fall, I just hope they open source their software…
No, they couldn’t do that. They’d have to sell every asset to pay the employees or give their ceo a golden parachute or any number of things aside from actually open sourcing. Anyway, Jellyfin is open source and just needs to work to reach feature parity.
If they saw the writing on the wall they could open-source before they went into bankruptcy. However, that could open them up to lawsuits if it was deemed they were “destroying” their assets before they could be claimed by investors and/or creditors, but that’s a big legal gray area depending on what you can show in court. And venture capitalists have better lawyers than bankrupt companies typically do.
The shareholders would most likely call that theft
This a 1/1000 likely outcome. Bankrupted companies will typically sell assets including IP and software to other companies to pay creditors (which excludes open sourcing them). And well before bankruptcy, any financial issues will cause Plex to be modified to support shitty monetization to the point that you won’t want the source code amyway.
Sorry for the bad outlook, better that you be ready than to hope for a unicorn.
I’m honestly surprised that Plex has revenue in the “double-digit millions”
30% growth after a 20% layoff huh?
Makes the growth 30% easier when it’s 20% less!
Corporate Greed
That won’t change anytime soon because the current way society is set up incentivizes it unfortunately.
Seriously. They expect 30% growth? They can afford a few salaries.
They don’t want to invest in the core program features anymore, they only want more customers & content acquisition.
What they want is inevitably going to make us their competition, Plex’s FAST userbase growth will be the death of the original product.
As a long-time Jellyfin user, I’ve never really understood how Plex makes money providing a handful of additional features over the FOSS alternative.
Plex is available in a lot more app stores than Jellyfin or Emby is. I run a plex server for friends but I use emby for my personal consumption. The reason I continue to use plex is because it’s available on all sorts of smart TV’s and semi-obscure streaming devices that Jellyfin isn’t.
Why use jellyfin when you already have Plex set up?
@steal_your_face @Kushan Because FOSS.
Well they also spent the past 10 years building 80% stuff we never wanted
And forcing logins to go through their centralized servers.
Plex login system is such a nightmare. There’s a mix of something that is local, some that are online but displayed as local, and some that are completely online. I gave up on Plex when I can’t figure out how to remove an old Plex instance that somehow the clients still connecting to instead of the new server.
Doesn’t Plex still use Python 2 as well?
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I would switch in a heartbeat if it didn’t use .NET. Plex is a giant heap of trash, but at least it doesn’t eat RAM.
What’s mono in thos context? Google is failing me.
I am mistaken. It now uses .NET Core, but before it used to use Mono as the .NET runtime. Either way, both are pigs.
Hopefully they leave the free features as is, and don’t starting going down the road many other companies have to squeeze out profit.
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.
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
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 beiing 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
(^_^')
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.
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.
As someone who’s been laid off, it always annoys me when people at the top try to act all hurt. Their name was never brought up as a potential layoff. The decision wasn’t nearly as hard as getting laid off.
Those who made the decision to go after the FAST market and lose money aren’t the ones getting laid off, it’s the ones who followed and built it. The risky outcome was never on the heads of those deciding to take the risk.
‘Some of you may die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take’
That doesn’t make it easy, knowing you have to make a choice that negatively impacts people that have dedicated time and parts of their lives to your project. Having to make a choice that impacts others is not easy and only a sociopath wouldn’t give a shit. Despite what many think on sites like this, often many leaders, especially in smaller companies like this that started as a passion project are not those types of people etc. They often don’t have the same personality traits you HAVE to have to climb a ladder at say, IBM or Dell etc.
That’s not to say it doesn’t suck for the people being laid off. And that you can’t have empathy and sympathy for both sides. It’s not a competition or a binary choice.
Of course it’s not an easy decision. But don’t go all “woe is me” when you’re not the one actually suffering. Own the mistake. Promise to do better.
Expressing empathy and sympathy for those that the decision affects and stating/iterating that it was not an easy choice isnt something I take as “woe is me” or playing the victim card.
The outcome and road ahead sucks for those affected no matter what. But sometimes all anyone can do is show some mercy and not be a dick with how they approach it.
Now, that said, it’s entirely situational and I don’t actually know the culture at plex as an employer (only as a customer). So this could totally be nothing more than lip service.
But understanding and differentiating the difference between lip service and sincerity does matter.
Empathy and sympathy is talking about how awful it is for people to have to lose their job. Especially in this market. What they’re doing is talking about themselves and how difficult it was for THEM to make the decision. I don’t care about them. I care about those who lost their livelihood.
You’re right that it wouldn’t be an easy decision. It must be awful. But losing your job is still way worse.
Those at the top are the sociopaths lol.
So anyone that has grown within a company and into leadership or executive positions are sociopaths full stop?
That’s not really a healthy outlook to have tbh.
It’s not a black and white thing. it’s a probability thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5389508#
I’m aware of the theory. And even acknowledged it in my initial reply in this very chain….
Oh, ok. Alright then
Oh boo hoo. They still get to go to work tomorrow. They still get a paycheck. They don’t have to go through the hassle of job seeking, interviewing, and the rejection letters. They don’t have to go home and wonder if they’ll make it through this time. They don’t have to see the worry in their spouse’s eyes, wondering if they will be able to pay the bills in the future.
And no, two weeks severance isn’t enough. It’s almost an insult really, as it can take that long to get interviews scheduled.
That’s missing the point entirely. The statement isn’t playing a victim card at all. It’s recogition that it’s a shitty position to put someone in.
Expressing empathy and sympathy for those that the decision affects and stating/iterating that it was not an easy choice isnt something I take as “woe is me” or playing the victim card.
The outcome and road ahead sucks for those affected no matter what. But sometimes all anyone can do is show some mercy and not be a dick with how they approach it.
Now, that said, it’s entirely situational and I don’t actually know the culture at plex as an employer (only as a customer). So this could totally be nothing more than lip service.
But understanding and differentiating the difference between lip service and sincerity does matter.
Empathy doesn’t pay the bills. I can’t call up the bank and say “hey I can’t pay the bill this month, but my ex-boss is really sorry about all this.”
Google and Friends gave people 6 months of severance. Thats enough time to get your life back on track. But two weeks is basically just “here have another single payslip to go away forever.”
Again not the point and no one said it did. But doing things with respect matters. And nothing lasts forever
Also 2 weeks is pretty standard, and isn’t terrible in an at will situation. Have you ever given a company 6 months notice?
Also if you are working full time at a company like Plex and living hand to mouth that’s not really on plex.
How are layoffs respectful? “Yeah we overspent or aren’t quite as profitable as we’d like, so we’ve determined that you’re redundant or unneeded or some other adjective that shouldn’t ever be used on a human, and so we’re going to have security perp walk you out of the office like you were caught stealing something, and we’ll have someone box up your shit and break some of it and mail it to you in 4-8 weeks. Please sign this paper that says you wont talk about what we did to you and we’ll toss a few bucks your way.”
I’ve even seen companies where people got informed they were laid off when they couldn’t log into their Slack account or whatever else. No other notice. Just dripping with respect.
I didn’t get laid off from Plex. I’ve been laid off from other companies, large and small, and had friends laid off while I was a “survivor”. My favorite time I was laid off was a few months after my wife had a baby, and a week after I told my boss she was pregnant again. That one extra paycheck sure helped me pay off the 2 month NICU stay for baby #1! I really felt respected by that company. Really liked it when the CEO sent out a form letter talking about how hard it was on him and how he lost a whole nights sleep figuring out who to screw over, instead of cutting costs in other areas.
When COVID started really popping off, management at my old job gathered all the technicians together in the shop. They read a bunch of names off a piece of paper while everyone stood around confused, then they said “If you heard your name, this is your last day with the company.” Absolutely heartless.
They then put out a canned public message about how hard the decision was, and how every employee is a member of the family.
Hopefully that doesn’t mean we are going to see a slowdown in personal media features.
It will. As someone who only uses Plex, I’m sure the company will have to strive so hard after monetization that they’ll ruin the product and force us onto an open source alternative. I like Plex, but I don’t expect it to last after seeing all the other tech companies fail at this.
we already have seen a slowdown in core usability features in favour of chasing new customers.
Wasn’t Plex originally a fork of XBMC?
Yoy might be thinking of Kodi. Plays media just fine on a RasPi, bit of a different experience though!
Both are forks of XBMC.
Why the fuck is Plex even a company? Attention venture capitalists: Get your money grubbing fingers the fuck off decent technologies that should in no way be tied to profit-seeking. We live in a dystopian hellscape.
The problem is that it’s public. A private company could very well exist to sell to its users a good service. It being public means it’s beholden to the investor’s desire for constant growth.
Tell me, what is Plex’s Nasdaq ticker?
The problem is that it’s public. A private company could very well exist to sell to its users a good service. It being public means it’s beholden to the investor’s desire for constant growth.
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Plex is private though?
Why are all these large tech companies failing this week? Is AI really decimating the internet on all fronts?
The problem isn’t AI, but interest rates.
Silicon Valley lived for a long time with an investor market that didn’t really have anything better to invest their money in, so they would invest in a series of Internet companies with the hope that one of them would make it rich. Now that lending money can make you more money, it isn’t worth it to invest in companies or ideas that don’t make money right now.
The VC funding that Silicon Valley relied on dried up. If you are a startup, you need to be profitable before you burn through your cash. If you aren’t a startup, you don’t have to worry as much about new tech cannibalizing your core businesses, so they are more willing to cut product lines.
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Not just this week but the past year or so
During covid many companies hired a ton of people due to the growth of many industries, particulalry consumer electronics and platforms like Plex and Netflix, and places like Amazon, Google, etc. Because many people were off work, there was greater demand. Obsiously infinite growth is not possible, and when things slowed down after covid, they moved to dump the employees they no longer needed
It doesnt necessarily have anything to do with AI; AI implementations are still extremely rough and moves to implement them at this point means providing an inferior experience. That said, some companies have been implementing AI, which will likely lead to worsening layoffs down the line
It’s been going on for nearly a year now, but the layoffs tend to happen in waves because the stock market and investors in general tend to be very reactionary. Also a lot of companies released their quarterly earnings recently
investors / business / money people are stupid hogs who are blindly guessing and making the stingiest possible choices at any turn, they don’t know shit or do shit
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
lol you posted this 4 times. Lemmy.world was really buggy, I think I did the same a few times before moving instances
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
The era of free money is over. You can easily get >4% returns just parking your money in fixed income, so investors want to see cash flow and the easiest way to boost margin is to cut your largest expense (aka headcount). AI is just a convenient excuse.
I don’t know if I’d call Plex a “large tech company” though
Yeah they had ~175 employees in January, and this layoff was like 37 people. A shame, but not large scale
I would as they store massive amounts of data
What do you mean?
It isn’t AI, it’s the economy. Companies that got money from investors regardless of their profitability now have to survive on their own profits which forces them to restructure
They’ve been failing for a while. It’s capitalism failing, not some magic tech entity concept like AI.
and it’s by design too
Money isn’t as cheap anymore as it used to be. Tech companies have been struggling for about a year now. Even the larger ones have to show profits these days (not defending them, just explaining as I’m working in tech as well)
Its not a tech issue, its a finance issue.
The tech industry has always been highly speculative. What we saw in the 2010s was only made possible through venture capital and high digital advertising budgets.
Now that there’s uncertainty and investments are expensive due to high interest rates, VC and advertisers are pulling back. As a result, we’re seeing a bunch of business models that have never been viable on their own have to try and support themselves for the first time.
It’s a greed issue. They are expecting 30% growth, and aren’t satisfied with that, so they are cutting jobs too.
Growth isn’t profit, if I lose $0.10 per widget and I grow my business from selling 1 million widgets per year to 1.1 million widgets per year I’m losing more money than I was before the growth.
The current prime interest rate means it’s more expensive to borrow money right now, which means PE and VC are not throwing money at tech firms that aren’t traditionally profitable anymore. Plex likely runs at a steep loss and relies on private capital to stay afloat.
Why are they even a company in the first place? They make an app that should objectively not be tied to profit-seeking.
Dear venture capitalist shitbags: get your money grubbing fingers off of technologies (like Reddit) that are objectively worse when tied to profit-seeking motives.
Making a tool for people to use is fine to seek profits. The trouble with Plex is that they’re going the Reddit route of trying so hard to generate profit that they neglect their core users and the experience that they’re willing to pay for.
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Or we could all switch to an Open Source alternative, Jellyfin, and either donate what you’d normally pay Plex or just enjoy it for free. I’ve never used Plex and started with Jellyfin. It’s gotten the job done thus far
I’ve never paid plex but just seals the deal. They obviously can’t be trusted to handle the money I give them properly. I wish Jellyfin was a litte more fullybaked though. The app for appletv is really bad
Edit:
Due to some maximally pedantic comments from @SaltySalamander@lemmy.fmhy.ml , I should clear something up. I’ve never paid plex. I can’t trust them to handle the money I give them hypothetically. This doesn’t mean that i’ve both not given them money and given them money. This means that in the case in which I did give them money, I wouldn’t trust them to handle it properly, given the rounds of layoffs happening there
You should try out Infuse. It’s $10/year and I’ve been loving it. Better than any other app I’ve tried and at under $1 a month worth it for me.
Maybe I’ll give it a try. Happen to know if it supports dual subtitles so I can watch foreign films with my gf who doesn’t speak english?
I’ve never paid plex
They obviously can’t be trusted to handle the money I give them properly
Which is it?
Can you explain your confusion? I don’t know what you’re asking
Let’s try combining your statements and see if that clears it up.
“They can’t be trusted to handle the money I’ve never paid them.”
That still doesn’t make any sense. I never said I paid them. What I think happened is you believed to have found some contradiction in what I said and felt so clever about it you had to run to your keyboard lest you forget just how clever you were.
It’s possible that in your rush to feel clever, you forgot to understand the english language. Happens a lot with people who have something to prove. Is it possible you read the sentence “They obviously can’t be trusted to handle the money I give them properly.” and took it as a tacit statement that I had given them money? To say that someone or some entity cannot properly handle the money I give them does not mean I gave that person or entity money. It means that should I give them money, they wouldn’t handle it well, thus I’m not going to. I can understand if english isn’t your first language, but this is a very typical construction. One should be able to understand it by the fifth grade. Hope that clears up any confusion. if it doesn’t help I highly recommend taking a break from the internet while you brush up on your reading comprehension
It’s the app ecosystem for plex that keeps me there. There’s an app for my LG tv, an app for my in-laws’ Roku etc.
I downloaded the free emby server for my pc and paid the single payment 4€ for the android tv app. No regrets, works great.
Emby is not open source any more.
In case you didn’t know, Roku and LG TVs have a Jellyfin app.
I do know but I’m grateful for your sharing anyway.
My point was more that plex coverage was wider than jellyfin.
I do agree. Unfortunately some platforms like PlayStation for example won’t allow Open Source apps so there is no chance in there being an app for these platforms.
However, more platforms are slowly being added with the Tizen app for Samsung TVs in progress and usable through side loading.
Yes you’re right, Jellyfin isn’t on many platforms but I’m pretty sure they have an app for LG and Roku (Clients here). Although the LG app isn’t the best from what I remember. What I usually do is use an Amazon fire stick with Tailscale for my family and it’s been working well. But also as popularity increases others will be able to contribute more and the apps will become better.
I use the Roku app every day. It’s very good.
It’s picked up nearly every feature I had used on Plex within the last year. The developers are doing great.
The devs for it are rock stars. So many good improvements in such a short time.
Its the only reason I am still using Plex, I don’t know if we will ever get Jellyfin on even half the devices that Plex is on. : (
Agreed. If Jellyfin has any desire to become the market leader and a legit alternative for home media streaming, an already narrow niche, they need to refine this piece of the end user experience.
And I’m not saying Jellyfin wants to do this. They’ve definitely found their hardcore enthusiast crowd.
Part of plex’s problem is their lifetime license subscription simply isn’t sustainable, much less geared for growth. Add in some of the cruff they have added into stuff like their “streaming” services and yeah this seems kinda obvious. Especially since they were relying on VC funding drives as recently as 5 years ago.
If jellyfin could record and playback OTA TV on my Apple TV I’d switch tomorrow, but it seems the team is either unable to or unwilling to work on that feature which is core to how my household uses Plex. The only maybe solution is Infuse which is paid and closed source so is no better really than using Plex in that regard.
Like most things in the world, your use case is not the only use case and as such a solution that checks all the boxes for you will not check all the boxes for everyone.
Does jellyfin supoort Ota recording at all?
It’s a big part of how I use plex as well.
Edit: looks like they may will be looking into it much more but I use hdhomeruns : https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/live-tv/
I wonder how I would replace plexamp
Edit: looks like they may will be looking into it much more but I use hdhomeruns : https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/live-tv/
I don’t understand what you mean by “they may be looking into it much more”? HDHomerun is supported explicitly per the link you provided
I* may be. Autocorrect got me
If you are on Android there is Finamp, which isn’t quite as nice but it is clean and free. If you’re willing to pay a couple bucks there’s also Symfonium which IMO is even better than Plexamp. It has way more customization and I love that it uses Material You.
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How does jellyfin compare to Kodi and Emby? I’ve been using Emby for the last couple of years and it’s fine, but I wonder if I’m missing out on any features.
Jellyfin came out of Emby if I am not wrong. Something like they took the open source parts and created jellyfin and then improvised upon that.
Jellyfin is a fork from when Emby went closed source.
Hmm, might give it a shot then. Emby seems more polished than Kodi was, which was the main reason I picked it. Does jellyfin have any of the features Emby premiere offers (GPU transcoding and a Google TV app?).
